"Killerspiele" Update (The "Why the EU can't define Killerspiele" Edition)

The European Union wanted to present a unified front against the producers of the so called "Killerspiele" - and they couldn't do it. And that's a good sign, because in the end it means there is no such thing as a "Killerspiel".

The members of the EU tried to define what a "Killerspiel" is, but they couldn't find the characteristic of such a game. That's not much of a surprise to me, because even in Germany we have not been able to define the "Killerspiel", as much as the conservative politicians tried.

What surprises me far more than this is the fact that they still pull out the topic whenever they need something to talk about that does not have anything to do with our real problems in Germany. I think, it's basically because they still think it's only a teenage phenomenon and thus their voters (although not their future voters) think the same way about it than they do.

And it's usually the older politicians who are very set about the whole topic - in other words: It's those politicians who have already fought against violent movies in the past and see this new topic as pretty much the same. The younger ones don't talk a lot about it - even though 'younger' in German politics doesn't mean 'young' the way everybody else would define it. A 'younger' politician in Germany is someone younger than 60. (And that's only a very little bit sarcastic.)

There are even some fair reports in the media by now (there's a good heise-article I can only recommend, although it's in German). Not many of them and not where the majority of those who don't know much about games can find them (most of those articles are online), but it's a good sign.

Nevertheless, the great discussion seems to be over (and unemployed people make a much better subject for the various TV-programs anyway) and until the next person runs amok in Germany, there's probably not going to be a lot of talking about.

For one thing a council deciding on art in Germany has proclaimed that computer games - no matter of which kind - are art as well, thus forbidding them would be censorship, something politicians in Germany don't like doing (too many unwanted parallels to the past).

Whatever world politicians inhabit

... it surely isn't the same world you and I live in, that much is for sure.

I was reminded of this when I watched another of those numerous political discussions on TV. The politicians participating in it obviously had no idea how life is for the average person on the streets these days.

For example they always state that we need to work much longer throughout our life, starting earlier and working a couple of years longer than at the moment, too. The whole idea does have merit, I have to admit it. If, and really just if, there were enough work for everyone, we should all at least work longer in our lives, because today we get a lot older than in the past. The problem, as you might have guessed already, is that currently we're missing about 4,000,000 jobs, so what I'd like to know from the politicians is how we are going to be able to work those five or ten or fifteen years longer.

Another example is pensions. In Germany we have - as I've already pointed out in past posts - a pension from the state that is financed by the working population paying and the older generation getting the money. On the whole that principle works - or rather, it would work if everyone could currently work -, but calculations by the European Union show that even if it works out and even if by miracle we manage to work longer without having months or even years of unemployment in between, the future will only bring each of us about 39% of our last income before we switch to pensions. The argument of a politician against that problem: The calculation does not take company pension plans into account.

Pardon me, but which company pension plan? In my case it's highly unlikely that I will ever get such a company pension plan, even though, in the future, I will not work as a telemarketer forever (but become a web-master in about a year). Small- and middle-sized companies can't afford such pension plans any longer - and even if they did, people do not spent a long time at one workplace any longer. Low-paying jobs like telemarketer, cleaner or waiter don't have pension plans as a rule, so especially those who don't earn much anyway will be left with next to no money after a long, hard life of work. When did those politicians last check over the reality in German companies? Surely not after the late 70ies or early 80ies.

And then one argument against minimal wage (another thing politicians argue a lot about at the moment): all the call-centers could go to India! Oh, please, yes, make them all go to India! Fact is, those call-centers working for a special company, only doing stuff for that company, surely won't go to India - and we'd all be better off without those call-centers who exploit their workforce and cheat their customers. Yes, let them leave for India immediately - it will at least give some people a short-time job, helping them pack.

I know we Germans have a very special problem that stunts the development of our economy. We don't like to serve - which is bad, given the fact that most new jobs will be created in the service-sector. This probably also is the reason why jobs in service usually aren't paid well, too - together with the fact that most jobs in service are done by women.

Apart from that I really doubt we'll have enough work for everyone soon (meaning sometime in the next 35 years while I might still be working). And that's a problem, because Germans tend to define them over their work (as I've already posted before).

Massive unemployment and the problem this brings for our pensions is something the politicians should lean to deal with, instead of denying it does exist.

Would you have recognized him?

Picture taken from "The Raven", AIP 1963

Believe it or not: this handsome, charming young man is ... Jack Nicholson.

It's actually, if the text on the back of my DVD-package isn't wrong, his very first movie role as the son of the rather untalented mage Dr. Bedlo in the AIP-movie "The Raven" - very freely after Edgar Allan Poe's epic poem. (And, for the female audience: He really looked good in those tights then.)

The movie is quite a good mixture between horror and comedy, featuring the three greatest horror actors of their time: Boris Karloff, Vincent Price and Peter Lorre. Dr. Craven (Vincent Price) leads a rather withdrawn life with his daughter Estelle (Olive Sturgess), bemoaning the death of his second wife Lenore (Hazel Court). One night a raven arrives at his house who turns out to be a fellow magician, turned into an animal by another mage. Dr. Bedlo (Peter Lorre) is changed back into human form (thought that takes some time) and coaxes Dr. Craven into coming with him to that mage, Dr. Scarabus (Boris Karloff), by telling him that he has seen Lenore there.

On the way to the castle of the evil Scarabus, they meet Bedlo's son Rexford (Jack Nicholson) who accompanies them. Of course Lenore is still alive - and has decided to leave her husband for the supposedly more powerful Dr. Scarabus - and of course there's finally a duel between Scarabus and Craven, but it's a good one with a lot of humour in it.

I'd still recommend the movie, if you happen to find it somewhere, as a nice way to pass an evening at home. Even though Price, Karloff and Lorre are more at home in a horror movie normally, they play their parts in this comedy very well. And even though the effects are nothing to write home about today (the movie is from 1963, again, if the text on the back of the package is correct), the whole story is quite funny with a few little shock effects and some action mixed in.

EDIT: after watching the theatrical trailer on my DVD, it seems as if AIP really advertised this movie as a horror movie - which it surely isn't today. But nevertheless, it's funny to watch and surely not worse than a lot of the stuff produced this day.

I'll become a little more aggressive now

Now, if you just know me from this blog - and most of you will only know me from this blog - I probably appear quite straight-forward to you. But in my everyday life, things are a bit different - and that's going to change.

This whole week was a very fine example of why the more feminine approach to life - and work life - isn't the most successful one and - especially due to the fact that I'll start doing a 'man's job' in a year or so (when I'm finished with my webmaster course) - I'm not going to settle for second place any longer.

During work I've usually been a rather soft-speaking and polite person, towards colleagues and superiors as well as towards customers (as I have pointed out already, I'm working as a telemarketer). After half a day's trial yesterday, I have learned that in some areas of telemarketing (and that's a job I'd rather have) being a straight-forward and decisive person who's ready to tell other's what they should be doing is needed. In addition Monday showed me that with decisiveness and a bit of aggressive behaviour I can get along better. I said I wouldn't take this job under those circumstances and I didn't even stay to have a look at it. Their problem is not my problem and too few workers are their problem and not mine.

Of course, I will not become rude and abusive, as I consider politeness a virtue for everyone, not just for a woman, but I won't hold back any longer. I can do a lot of stuff and I would be an asset to every company I chose to work for. That's how men communicate things and that's how I am going to do it from now on as well. If men can get jobs by metaphorically standing up and beating their chest like a gorilla, then I can do that, too. After all, I've got more of a chest than the average man (cup D, currently)...

I'm fed up with trying to be feminine, anyway. I've never really seen the point in it (even as a child, as I already pointed out) and I don't really see where it would be helpful. I don't want to be a man (even though, during "that certain time of the month" it would be handy), I just want to be myself ... and that's definitely not trying to be a nice, little woman. In our world chivalry is dead - at least mostly -, so a woman has to look out for herself. And we can easily look for ourselves, so why should we act like we couldn't?

Women are as intelligent as men, today more girls than boys went to higher school types in my home country and more young women than men go to university. And at the same time we should act like we're not able to speak for ourselves? No way, José!

So from now on I'm really going to advertise myself. If I don't tell other people what I can do, who will?

Scary Stories

So, now, after a few stories inspired more or less by current events, I return to a post I've meant to write for quite some time. It doesn't contain anything about torture (well, some day I'll get over this) or my regular crusades. It's about a couple of novels by Paul Doherty. I've read only a few of his novels and all of them were horror stories: "The Plague Lord", "The Soul Slayer", "The Rose Demon" and "The Haunting". But I'll only write about two of them, "The Plague Lord" and "The Haunting".

All of the mentioned novels are set in historical environments. "The Plague Lord" is set in ancient China (during the rule of Kublai Khan) and features Marco Polo as a main character. "The Rose Demon" is set during the time of the crusades and "The Soul Slayer" during the rule of Elisabeth I. "The Haunting" finally is set roughly in the Victorian period. But the historical periods aren't the reason why I like those two novels better than the other two. It's the stories they tell.

"The Plague Lord" features Marco Polo living in China. There are quite some historians who these days doubt he ever reached this empire, but then, that's not important for a novel, because it's not a scientific book anyway. Incidentally another thing the book implies is today considered a possibility: That the plague started somewhere in China and came to Europe via Venice. As Venice then was one of the most important harbours for everything coming from the Far East (via the dessert on caravans to Asia Minor and from there with ships to Venice, then the harbour doing most business with Asian countries), if the plague has come from Asia, it came landed in Venice.

But the "Plague Lord" featured in the story is not a virus. It is an entity that existed before, trapped in a tomb somewhere in the middle of China, acting (just as in real history) through a new kind of rat, a black rat, not a grey one - a plague rat. During the story it is freed, it comes to the forbidden city, to one of the largest capitals of the world, and only a handful of people can stop it (as is usual in horror stories). Of course, as always, there's also human agents, people who freely help this entity. "The Plague Lord" - pretty much like the other demons in Doherty's stories, jumps

from body to body, using human and animal minds to reach its goal.

And just killing all its human helpers doesn't completely stop it ... the end contains a hint that the rats have made it to Venice (as we, the modern readers, know - the plague has, after all, come to Europe in the Middle Ages).

Doherty, and that's obvious in all the stories by him I've read, is extremely good at picturing the historical period his stories are set in. So, while reading an interesting and sometimes quite scary novel, people actually learn something about history.

The work of the human agents - which also brings Marco Polo as a trusted acquaintance of Kublai Khan in - starts with killing those responsible for taking away the junk and cleaning the streets. Clean streets mean less rats and less rats mean less chances of the plague spreading among the humans. As China at that time had a more efficient waste disposal system than Europe, it was necessary to sabotage it for the "Plague Lord" to rule again. Marco Polo is ordered to find out who killed those men and why and this makes him cross paths with the "Plague Lord's" helpers - and after a while with the "Plague Lord" himself. There's scary parts in it, ghosts coming back to haunt Marco Polo and his household are the scene I can recall most easily, even after more than one year since the last read.

There's ages in history between "The Plague Lord" and the second novel I want to write about, "The Haunting". As the name suggests, the novel is about a haunted mansion somewhere in Victorian England. Main character (at least among the living) is a rather shy and withdrawn Catholic priest whose biggest talent is exorcism. The story starts off with him banning a ghost in a flat somewhere in central London. But central London is not a haunted mansion somewhere in the country.

His adversary is the first lady of the mansion, a dangerous and deeply evil woman who does not want to move on, who has anchored herself deeply in that mansion (in which she was murdered by her stepdaughter after a true reign of horror) and taken over the minds of various other ladies of the mansion (and is attempting it again).

Slowly the young priest and his sister unravel the story, finding clues end even, finally, the remains of the woman - necessary to drive her from the mansion completely. But the lady fights back, bringing up the ghosts we all have in our past, creating horrible nightmares and nightly haunting (thus the title).

In the end, the lady is banished for the moment, but - just as the ghost he drove out of that flat in London - she might come back some day. Some evil, that seems to be the basic line of the story, cannot be eradicated.

Again Doherty writes a masterful story in this book. He depicts the period, the people and the place - which this time is a lot closer to us than ancient China - in a very vivid way that makes it easy to imagine them. And as you can see the huge mansion with its long stone halls and large rooms in your mind, it's easy to imagine the "haunting" part with words being written in blood, a man falling down the stairs to the crypt, another man being hung in a large tree by his own scarf and so on.

Both novels - and the others as well - are very well written and can surely cool you down on a hot summer day.

Advices on certain offers...

In those almost 33 years on our nice planet, I've learned a few things. One of them is to be careful with certain offers.

The first kind of offers to be careful about is the one where you have to decide on the spot. That's okay when it comes to deciding whether you want to eat vanilla- or chocolate-flavoured ice-cream - the worst thing that might happen then is that you realize halfway through your cone that the other sort would have been better. But when it comes to buy something worth more than a couple of Euros or when you're deciding whether or not to take a job offer (and yes, it's still an offer, no matter how much the employers these days act like they're doing you a favour by inviting you to a job interview), you should be able to sleep over it and think about it in peace. If someone wants a decision immediately, from my experience, the only right answer is "No".

The second kind of offers to be careful about is the one where the vendor is talking fast and not really answering your questions. Now, you don't know me in person and so you can't know I talk pretty fast myself. And if I think someone's talking fast, they're talking damn fast. You see, from my experience, people only talk very fast and don't answer your questions when they want to make sure you don't understand all of it.

Why am I writing this today? Because I had a job interview this morning and it was abysmal (and that's seeing it positively, something I don't do as a rule, normally). First of all I had the interview set at 8:30 - and the woman doing the interview was late. But that's not a problem for me, something like that can happen even in the best possible companies. Then it turned out that something had not been communicated right. I have been invited to this interview via a temporal employment agency (about which I've already written my share) and the woman there told me to expect it to last for a couple of hours, but what she didn’t tell me was that it a) would last the whole day as I was expected to go through a trial day of work today and that it b) would mean deciding this afternoon at five whether to take the job or not. In addition, she didn't answer any questions about that job beforehand, telling me I'll be "seeing about that in a few minutes anyway". Sorry, but I ask questions to get information when I think I need it. What's wrong with giving me a short summary of the job? I have another interview tomorrow and I don't hurry to say "Yes" to one offer before I have heard the second one. So I have done as I have advised above and said "No" immediately, not even staying for a day. What's the point in a trial day when you know you'll decline the offer anyway?

She was a fast-talker, she didn't answer my questions at all and she wanted to press for a decision. That's three good reasons to say ""Sod off," and if I ever meet you again, it'll be twenty billion years too soon" - though, of course, I declined the offer more politely. (And that, by the way, was quoted from the "Black Adder" episode "Sense and Senility")

Now, what I could gather about this company (which I had been to before, but they didn't really leave a good impression then either) is that they have a new project running and need new personnel immediately. If I were leading a company in this business (and let's all have a good laugh about that thought ... go on, I know you're not finished yet ... okay, that's enough), I would make sure to go through the interviews with possible employees beforehand. I would invite them in, talk to them, tell them that there might be a job open at a certain date and I would call them back then and wait calmly for the company I deal with to make its decision. That way I wouldn't land in that company's trouble: Having a new project and not enough people to deal with it.

After all, a new project doesn't come out of the blue, it takes time until you get it. First you have to find a possible new project, then you have to decide whether it fit's with your ethics (let's all laugh a bit about call-centers and ethics ... that should be enough), make your offer and wait for them to decide. Surely that takes longer than just a few hours (although possibly not that part about ethics, that should be done in a couple of seconds at the outmost).

I'm no genius when it comes to economics, but even I know that one should always be prepared.

Anyway, keep those advices about offers in mind, they might help you to avoid a lot of trouble. And always listen to your gut instincts (of feminine intuition or whatever you personally call it). It's your subconscious speaking and subconsciously you always gather more information to work with than with your mind alone.

Relationships I don't want

A lot of people would say that I shouldn't say anything about relationships, as I don't have one at the moment and didn't have any really long ones in the past. That might have to do something with the fact that I'm a loner ... or maybe I've just not met the right one for me.

On the whole I can't say anything bad about my friend Heike's boyfriend Franz. I haven't met him very often (just once, actually), but he seemed an okay guy to me. But what I really don't like about their relationship is how much my friend depends on her boyfriend.

I know that relationship means 'two people', not just one. And where there's more than one person, compromises have to be reached and sometimes one person has to take the lead. But, even though I personally don't have a long-time relationship, I've had years to study one that's held over forty years now: my own parents' relationship. Now, to a certain extend my parents are both quite headstrong, but they've learned to make compromises and work together.

Heike's relationship with her boyfriend is quite different. She leaves almost all the important decisions to him. For example: I know that she likes to surf the internet, but her friend thought that she would do it too often if they had a connection at home, so they didn't get one (even though, with today's flat-rates, that wouldn't have been too expensive). Or right now: They do have internet now, even broadband, and they got themselves a new computer for it (as I've already written in another post some time ago), but, because her boyfriend thinks it's handy for work, he has hogged it completely. It's not the fact alone that he wants his own computer for work, but he can, in fact, write such a computer off on taxes - and could, provided his boss is okay with it, even get one from work. This way, Heike again has to go to an internet café or so in order to get online, even if it's just to check her emails. And with her shitty job, she doesn't really have the time for that.

I wouldn't allow someone else to rule my life like that, neither would any of my parents. But Heike seems to thrive on it, during her short marriage as well as in her current relationship. I don't know whether it's because she has seen this in her own parents' relationship (but given the fact that her father's a soldier, it's possible) or whether she thinks it's the only way to keep a boyfriend. As my parents are a good example for the fact that it doesn't have to be this way at all, I simply can't understand a woman submitting herself to someone else like that. I wouldn't do that, even if it were for the man of my dreams. Too proud? Maybe. But I'm rather my own person and alone than in a relationship and just someone else's puppet.

And she always tries to fix me up with someone... She probably thinks I need someone. She probably even thinks I would be more happy in a relationship like hers. But I wouldn't and I have stopped trying to talk to her about it. She wants it that way and nothing I could ever say will make her change her mind.

As I'm saying, I don't think her boyfriend is a tyrant, but he probably just assumes the role because she lets him and he's almost ten years older than she is. And I don't think the age-difference is the main reason.

I, personally, don't want a relationship in which I have to submit, I'll rather stay alone than spent the rest of my life submitting to someone just because he happens to be the 'man' in the relationship.