I’ve pulled the number one blog faux pas: I’ve pulled myself out of the online world for the last couple of weeks with no warning; with no explanation for my absence. For all of you few who read my blog I could be dead. I’m not, I’m still here poking around but I have been distracted. There were a number of events that lead to the derailing of my blog.

It started with the piece I wrote, Welcome to the Noosphere. I really put some effort into it, and i wanted to continue the format of writing largish essays with less frequency than just commenting on whatever meme of the day was floating around the web. So I stopped updating as much while I ‘worked’ on some new pieces. At this same time, one of my best friends decided to surprise us all by coming into town and visit for two weeks. He’s been living life quite happily in England for almost a year now, but here he was, back in Winnipeg and forcing us out of our ruts. During this time I was quite busy, so I can understand the lack of updates. Given the choice between writing and hanging out with Howie, I’d take Howie every time.
There were two other distractions that had emerged to take a lot of mental processing by the time Howie left. One was an online game, the other was a woman. I’ll talk about the game first.
I’ve been playing these free online games at WSA for quite some time now. If you’ve never played video games or if they hold absolutely no interest to you then you’d probably better skip the next couple of paragraphs.
This game that I started playing is an intensely competitive tactical role playing experience. How to describe this without going into too much detail… Ultimately this game is about diplomacy and strategy. The diplomacy comes with convincing all the people that are in your alliance that you’re competent enough to lead them; the strategy comes in coordinating attacks and defense amongst your alliance members. I started off the leader of a small alliance and as the game progressed it became a bigger alliance. When you become responsible for the collective strength of an alliance of 40 people then you can start to get compulsive about making sure that everything is going well. Everything did go well, and as this was my first real experience as a leader I think I pulled it off. However, this game requires endless conversations, debates and arguments. That’s the diplomacy part.
I put my all into this game for the last 3 weeks, but now the time has come for me to pass the torch. The mantle of leadership has changed as alliances have merged, and I realize that ultimately this is probably the best for me. As going from a leader to grunt takes the intensity out of the game, I can now concentrate on some more important things. One of these things is a new project that I’m forcing myself to do: I’ve (sortof) registered a domain winnipegforums.ca (Not working yet) that I’m going to try and whore out to Winnipeg. We’re currently in the throes of an election and I feel that the the merging of politics and the internet hasn’t really taken off here. I’m going to do something about that – I will be setting up this forum and then doing an advertising campaign over the next week. I’m going to treat this as an experiment, so I’ll try and do lots of documentation as I go along. Stay tuned!
I guess I’ve sort of made a promise to myself not to talk too much about my personal, personal life on this blog, however I feel certain things are important to at least mention, especially as it is the largest distraction for me: I’ve met an incredible girl that is slowly consuming my world. This my friends is the good kind of consumption. 😉 It’s hard to talk in generalities, so I won’t – all I’ll say is that it’s very pleasant to be distracted sometimes.