Christmas is a-coming, so thoughts turn to how we can change the world next year and make loads of money, and well never have to work again.

At the moment it appears you can make a lot of money from writing flash based facebook games that basically turn people into clicky automatons.  So we’ve been thinking, there must be a way for us to enslave people in our own version of a flash based sweatshop – but first we needed to work out just what makes them so successfull.

Drudgery: people apparently enjoy virtual versions of labour intensive jobs that advances in modern machinery and technology has all but eliminated.

So how about Dishville? Where you have to wash the dishes?

Reward: Ruth thinks this won’t work because you need a ‘reward’. Apparently in a certain farming game “oh look i have a picture of some grapes” constitutes a reward, so we need to find a game that gives people a reward.

Sweepville? where you clean the street and at the end you get a reward from a local councillor? … humm maybe not

So what else do we need? Oh yes, the game has to enslave your friends too. Again drawing inspiration from a certain agricultural game, you can apparently guilt people into playing by doing their farming for them. Personally I don’t see why this works but hey ho.

Anyway, we’ve had a bit of a scuba in our thinktank, and ran a couple of things up the ideas runway; and now I can announce the next big thing in the world of doing a boring job on the internet:

PostVillie!

You are a postmaster – so you have to deliver letters, occasionally sell stamps and maybe every once in a while deal with an aggressive pensioner whose pension book has gone missing.

The main bit of the game however will be the enslaving delivery system;

• using the names of everyone playing the game (i reckon we’ll get around 70million) you will get a letter to deliver to someone who might or might not be a friend
• but you can only send it to one of your friends who will then send it on
• when it gets to the right person – the postage cost will be divided between everyone who handled the letter
• so if the letter goes through 5 people you get a fifth of the money

This, I think, is a winner. It has the drudgery of running a post office, combined with the reward of someone saying ‘I got a letter’ and the enslaving of your friends to send the mail.

Now I just have to learn some flash….. but I can’t be bothered, oh well I need another money making scheme.

just downloaded the transparent iPhone App

more piccies over here.

We noticed the gulf  - but we use to try to pretend it’s just because were in that mad two children under 5; lucky we remember to put coats on stage of our life. but as Daisy edges out of the fuzz of small child we’re waking up the the real truth – we are just not hip, cool, or indeed in touch.

It’s questionable that we ever were; we we’re never the party animals, concert goers, clubers and even most movies just passed us by – but we were at least keeping up with the TV, comings and goings in most of the things ‘other’ people talked about, and then we went to India.

India – is (well it was in 2003) a bit different to the UK (well the 2003 version of it) – it was a culture shock, not as much as you think; because well you always just cope when you’re in the thick of it; it was however quite a life event, ‘an expericene’ is the best way to describe it – coupled with the near abandonment thing in New Delhi airport when our return Kergystan flight was cancelled, did make it one of those things we annoyed almost everybody with for many years to come.

We did however return from the ‘experience’ back to the lovely cosy – fast driving western world, and to recover from the shock we went to Bowness-on-Windermere – the most diametrically opposite place to Delhi we could find -it’s just looking back what we’re not sure of is if we ever returned from Bowness.

Here we are now in 2009 (apparently) as we are just so out of touch with everyone else – we’ve never seen x-factor (2005) – we don’t even watch strictly come dancing – and the last film we went out to see was I-Robot (2004); apparently there are all sorts of trendy bands and stuff now. increasingly conversations revolve around things we have little or no idea about – someone mentions how X on strictly has just done Y -

• “who’s X?”
• “o you know the one off – (some programme i didn’t even realise was still on - usually Holby City – which is some form of Casulty spin off i think)”

It’s not that we are living in the past – we’re very technically literate, and absorbing all sorts of things from the world, they just don’t appear to be the things everybody else is absorbing – so culturally we are stuck in bowness on 15th october 2003 – and if i’m honest – it’s quite nice.

For what passes as entertainment in the jump household – I offer this little insight.

there was some ‘nearly’ classic Winnie-the-pooh on playhouse Disney this morning, which had us all watching, especially as it’s coinciding with the reading of the Winnie-the-pooh stories at bedtime. they where mixing there stories so we had eeyore in the river, then his birthday.

Anyway I was interested to see just when we where talking about, so i did some interneting, and got to a few interesting things, including the fact that disney makes $1 billion dollars a year from pooh! also in 2000 the Canadian Medical journal published a paper about what was wrong with everyone in the hundred acre wood.

Apparently pooh bear has ADHD and OCD, Tigger is hyperactive and owl is dyslexic : yes, but it’s quite depressing to then read that given the chance the people who did the study would be drugging up half the forest – mainly to cure these problems. I don’t see why ?Pooh is perfectly happy with his lot, why does he need drugs, and if you took the bounce out of Tigger then everybody’s life would be sadder.