May 13th, 2015 is the 13th anniversary of me starting this blog. Very meta, no? While for the past few years this has been a blog devoted to videogames, you can probably tell from my lack of posts that my enthusiasm for talking about games is waning.

In ye olden days I talked about all kinds of random stuff. TV, books, eating healthy…whatever random thing crossed my mind. And I think it’s time to go back to that. The alternative I guess is just closing down the blog but it seems unlucky to shut it down in its 13th year.

The fact is I just think the gaming community has worn me down. I still like to play games, but too often talking about them leads to arguing about them and that just leaves me feeling bitter and tired. For years now I’ve self-identified as a Gamer who blogged about games and filled his social media friends lists with other people who self identify as Gamers.

But man it’s getting ugly out there.

For the last few months I’ve been removing more and more “gamers” from my social media lists and replacing them with scientists, programmers or in some cases even brands I’m interested in. This has made social media a more passive activity for me, but more enlightening and less frustrating overall. And less time consuming. The other day I got into an argument on social media over the tag line on a can of beer, for god’s sake. Life is too short for that kind of nonsense. I just felt so stupid afterwards; I’d wasted my time and the time of the other people involved in the ‘discussion.’ On the other hand, the next day a cosmologist favorited a tweet of mine and I felt oddly proud of that. LOL.

And while I just said I still like to play games, I don’t think I’m satisfied with just playing games. I’ve been working two jobs for years now and that doesn’t leave a lot of free time, but what time I have I’ve devoted to gaming and just gaming and I’m starting to feel very static because of that. I don’t spend time learning new things anymore and I feel like that is making me stupid.

So my resolution now is to balance gaming with other interests and try to expand my horizons. I’m not even sure what that means in practical terms. I just know I really feel the urge to use my brain for a change. If I come up with any interesting projects maybe I’ll write about them here. And I hope eventually my enthusiasm for games comes back enough that I come up with a post or two about them, too. I’m pinning a lot of my gaming hopes on The Witcher III right now.

But if you have Dragonchasers in a blogroll or have this blog in your RSS reader (hey, I thought I was the last one using an RSS reader!) under the category ‘games’ it might be time to cut me loose and replace me with someone who is more focused on gaming. Life is change and change is life, right? Time to try something new.