It’s been a little over a week since I started my job blogging for ITWorld.

Today I noticed my XFire Profile:

“This Week: No Games Played” Huh. Now in all honesty this isn’t accurate because I’ve played 8 hours of Too Human on the XBox since I bought it last Saturday morning, but the bulk of that time was on Saturday and Sunday.

I’m finding it an interesting challenge to come up with 1-2 tech-related topics to write about every day. Some days, like when Facebook changes it Terms of Use, the topic is obvious. Other days I have to stretch a lot more.

I feel strongly that this experience is good for me as a writer. It’s enforced discipline to put butt in chair and *write* every day (well, except weekends…my contract only covers week days) and to expand my knowledge of technology, which is one of my ‘natural’ passions anyway.

But in order to feed the muse, so to speak, I’ve had to expand my cloud of Twitter Followees and have added a ton of tech-related RSS feeds to my news reader. My posts tend to be a mix of condensed and regurgitated tech news & research mixed with my opinion, so I need to be in constant scan mode to know what the big story is on any given day. Then I spend a good chunk of time doing the research (sometimes I have to do very little because its something I already am well versed in, other times I have to do a lot) and finally I write my posts.

All this scanning, researching and writing is taking a lot of time, and by the time I finish that, then catch up on all my “personal” (aka, gaming-related) RSS feeds, it was time for bed. Some nights I don’t even get caught up before midnight comes creeping around and then I was starting the next day with a backlog.

So last night I just had to give in and start deleting feeds that I’m not super interested in. Warhammer bloggers, for instance. I’m not playing, don’t plan to go back to playing, and had to make the tough choice to cut people I really enjoyed reading just because their topic was no longer relevant to my life. I feel really guilty about this, like I’m letting friends down, though I know they won’t know I’m not reading them anymore. But *I* know.

So what’s the point of this post? I guess I just felt like I needed to explain why I’m not reading and commenting on your blogs as much as I used to. (Actually, a lot of you might see that as a blessing, not having Pete S gumming up the works all the time!!) It just occured to me, this is a bit like when Ysharros talked about people leaving a guild with no explanation. I feel like I’m leaving a “guild” in a way, and I just wanted the chance to explain why. It isn’t that your blogs don’t still rock, because they do. It’s just a question of a finite number of hours in any given day. By cutting down the number of gaming blogs I read, I hope to free up time to actually do some gaming. I hope you’ll understand this decision.

I realize my posting has been getting pretty infrequent here at Dragonchasers. Sadly, it’s going to become even more so. As of today, I’m writing for ITworld.com, and I’m committed to a post a day for those good folks, which is going to leave even less time for personal blogging (and for that matter, less time for gaming).

For me personally, this is great news. My writing has been getting sloppier and sloppier over the past several years since I have no one to answer to. Now I have to start disciplining myself and sharpening up my skills again. And of course, the money never hurts!!

Hopefully people will still have room in their RSS feeds for those days when I can squeak out a DC post (or on weekends). Adding to the weird scheduling is my full-time job. I think I may have mentioned here that we had some layoffs in December, and at the same time all the survivors had their pay & hours cut by 10%. I opted to work 4×9 hour days, so Monday-Thursday I’m getting home pretty late. An extra hour doesn’t sound like much but it really has impacted my schedule quite a bit. So most of my gaming and consequently, personal blogging time is happening Friday-Sunday these days.

As always, thanks so much for reading Dragonchasers!

If dragonchasers is displaying wonky, please do a shift-refresh and see if that fixes things. I asked Angela to tweak the theme a bit, removing the left sidebar so the text isn’t so narrow, and it seems like the old stylesheet is cached or something. Rather than fix it, I’m taking the lazy way out and asking readers to refresh. 🙂

Hopefully the new layout will give me a bit more freedom when it comes to laying out posts with images, as well as cutting down on all the scrolling the old version required. Next time, I’ll take the designer’s advice and get things right the first time!! 🙂

I was doing a bit of blog surfing tonight and happened to notice someone who had Dragonchasers in their blog roll. Someone who wasn’t in my blog roll.

I fixed that now.

But please, I don’t want to be what Ysh an unnamed blogger calls a link leech!! If you’re linking here and I’m not returning the favor, just give me a shout. You can comment here or nudge me on twitter.

My deepest apologies for starting conversations and then disappearing on my readers. It wasn’t planned but neither was it really avoidable. If you happen to follow me on Twitter then you probably had an idea that the week wasn’t going exactly swimmingly. Lots of work (literally from the time I got to the office until the time I went to bed, with an hour off for dinner), a bad financial crisis, a savaging of company morale, and some sudden changes in travel plans… I couldn’t manage to keep up with my RSS feeds, let alone find time to post.

Mother Nature appears to be coming to the rescue though. School closings have already been announced for tomorrow in this area, and some of my friends at other companies in the area told me they’ve already been told the office is being closed.

Of course, my company said “We care deeply for the safety of our employees, but short of a National Emergency, the office remains open.” That said, my intent is to take half a vacation day. Last year there was a storm that made my normal 20 minute commute into a harrowing 6 hours on the road, and the weather service says this is going to be the same kind of storm. Specifically they said:

“At this time…travel is not recommended anytime Friday afternoon and evening…as we expect heavy snow treacherous road conditions during this time.”

No way I’m risking another ordeal like last year!!

Anyway, hopefully I’ll be back on my feet and posting again soon. Thanks for sticking with me through this dry spell!

I posted a, er, post this morning, and might have got a lot of it wrong…

I’m at work and can’t really take the time to straighten the mess out, so for now I’m just unpublishing the post. If I’m mis-representing someone, I don’t want to leave the post up there until tonight.

UPDATE: Lunch hour FTW. After discussing some things with some people, I’ve reworked the post to more accurately reflect what was actually said (vs what I thought was being said) and my reaction to one minor point in someone else’s blog.

My apologies for all the drama-queenerie.

In some ways it is grimly amusing how many of us bloggers can take something as fun as gaming and turn it into a source of negativity. I both produce irrelevant negativity, and consume it. I’ve been trying to stop, on both counts.

From the posting side of things, I’ve been trying to focus on the joy that comes from this wonderful hobby of ours. I will still say negative things about a game I’m playing, but only in the context of a “review-like” post that is meant to help you decide whether you want to buy or avoid. I’m trying to stay far away from “Game X [which I am not playing] sucks because of Y” and staying even farther away from negative comments about other gamers and their choices.

From a consumption point of view, I’ve been thinning down the list of sites and blogs in my RSS reader. If a blogger or site writes the kinds of posts that are full of negativity, I’m removing that site. I understand how cathartic venting in text can be; I’m not judging anyone! But I just don’t want to read that kind of post any more.

Since trying on this new attitude, I’ve found I’ve been enjoying gaming a lot more. I have more time to play (fewer sites to read = more free time). And I’ve felt better emotionally, and this feeling extends beyond gaming.

I just too easily slip into the Quixotic desire to debate/debunk posts that I feel are unfairly negative towards a product or service. And those can become real tar baby issues for me, leading towards frustration and wasted energy. They quickly become toxic.

Anyway, that’s my Monday morning rambling for this week. Please call me on it if you see me slipping back into writing pointlessly negative posts. Gaming (to me at least) is supposed to be about discovering new worlds and having fun. I’m going to try to keep my focus there.