False Starts No More
Life tends to be full of false starts, at least with this current run I am having with life. Fun fact, this is not the first time I have tried to start up a website/blog. I have had many ideas and attempts to get a "brand" together and get my friends hyped to rock and roll with building something.
It always started with small ideas, as most great things do, but those small ideas quickly became complex and the focus clouded, either by introducing too many people who also have many great ideas into the equation, or by getting caught up in the weeds of what to name the thing, or who should be doing what. Inundated by the seemingly important minutia completely downed out many blogs and websites that I tried to breathe life into back in my early 2000s.
Yes, I put money down for hosting on Rackspace. Yes, I laid my stake in many domain names and I picked up the .com, .net, and .org variations of the brand or blog name to make sure that the identity was solidified. This was never truly unique to website or blog creation, but often when creating a new character in an MMO or any game, I have been known to completely wipe the slate clean because I didn’t like the name I chose, or because I could no longer change the hairstyle or eye color of the character. Instead of being able to focus on all the positives about the game and the experience that I was sharing with my friends, I could only see the negatives. And so, guess who was level 1 again amongst friends who were often level 20+? Yours truly.
So what am I doing differently this time around? Well, for starters I am trying not to focus on what the brand/blog doesn't have, but trying my best to focus on what it does have. At the moment the brand I am working on has a couple of really good friends, and together with our ideas of what we can make the website into are practically endless. They are overflowing so much that we got a Trello account running to get all the ideas "on paper". I am also getting my wife involved with this as a "manager" of sorts.
She reminded me to get something posted up tonight, so I am working on one of my many, many drafts and polishing it up to post to my blog, where you are reading this now.
The project I am working on with my friend, and wife, and who knows who else in the future, is called Life After Guild. And it's based on the idea about the life that happens after the guild disbands.
This is meant not just literally as I no longer play World of Warcraft and simply do not have the time necessary to be a part of a persistent MMO. It would be a disservice to be only to give part of the energy required to truly be immersed and dedicated to a guild within a game.
The other side of the meaning of Life After Guild is about what happens after friends drift apart. Life comes at you without anyone being ready for it, and simple moments in your past can become beacons for memories to look back on the simpler times.
As fortunate as I am to be happily married, I do look back on the days when I would call my friends up and we would all meet up on the drop of a dime to hang out and just do whatever. Go eat, chill and play video games, meet up for a raid in an MMO. Once a friend and I decided to go hiking way before 5 am without having slept the previous night at all.
This isn't just on me for getting married. My focus and priorities have changed much for the better. My friends have relationships and some even now have children which understandably take priority to just dropping everything to hang out.
Dropping everything back a decade ago meant dropping plans to go to the gym, or watch a movie. But dropping everything in the present day means potentially letting down the people you hold most dear to you.
The struggle to remain a gamer and a nerd in my newly created world with responsibilities and obligations is a real struggle. Often a gaming session will be thirty to forty-five minutes at a time, maybe up to an hour or so before I need to hit pause. Long gone are the days of gaming for two to four hours just because I can.
Time is precious, and I'm not about to waste time starting something that I cannot see through. I would like very much to be able to apply this attitude towards several things in my life; one being this Life After Guild, and two being this blog. Being consistent with something is good to do, and pouring out my brain onto digital parchment shouldn't be too painful once in a while. Let's see how deep my mental ink well really is.