Playtime is over

So I guess this is the post which I referred to last time. You know, the sequel to the Vincent post. Apparently, people think I will become a hitman or a cab driver since the quote came from Collateral. Hell, I may even dye my hair gray or something, as long as it's crazy enough eh? No really, I'll try to make this post as serious as possible since it contains quite a big announcement for the guys at PlayStage. If you're not a fellow crewmember at PS, don't bother reading this post. My next post about the many aspects of life and love will have to wait until next time. So au revoir to you and to the crew: please, do continue.

I'm not going to become a hitman and I'm not going to dye my hair, let's make that clear. Nor am I likely to become a cab driver and transport hitmen across town. However, I plan to change my lifestyle in a few ways and I've decided that in order to do so, I have to quit with PlayStage.

Perhaps some of you saw it coming (have I really become so predictable?), perhaps you didn't. I don't want to sound selfish here, but I guess you thought I would be the last person to quit PlayStage. Unfortunately that's not the case. I will quit for now and I'm not changing my mind. I have thought this over for a few weeks now, and it always occured to me that this was the right thing to do.

I should try to explain why I quit. Don't expect to read much stuff that makes sense, there's a massive amount of thoughts raging through my mind at this moment and I find it really hard to write them down. Anyway, since I've been with PlayStage for quite some time now, I found the excuse of "I have too much work at school" a wee bit unsatisfying. The true reason is that PlayStage has become a too big part of my life. When I get home from school, the first thing I do is visit PlayStage to read the news and the posts on our forums. Well, that ain't really bad. But I stick around this damn computer for way too long from that moment on, just visiting random forums (besides Playstage) and reading posts that really don't interest me. I don't know why, it has become such an addiction that I experienced it as normal the last few years. But now I really feel like getting away from it. I don't have any use from it, I just sit here in front of this screen, getting lazy, learning nothing and most of the time not having fun at all.

Playstage was and is until today the main reason why I spend so much time online. As editor in chief, I found it my responsibility to post as much news and screenshots as possible and to keep our database up to date regularly. This behind-the-scenes work (filling the database and looking everywhere to find some interesting news) was quite satisfying most of the time, but lately I became just so bored of it that I started to think about why I was still doing this. I was thinking about my friends who spent their time with making movies or studying, you know, something that is useful. I just sit here in front of this screen, just clicking away without any particular reason.

A few weeks back, not so long after our stay in Terra Ventura, I spent most of the night awake thinkingthe whole Playstage thing over and I decided to just quit with Playstage and the whole online gaming news community and do something else with my life. I don't know what exactly, but now I am just totally sick of wasting all my time in front of this screen. I have to pick up my guitar again, learn to study, meet some people in real life rather than chatting on MSN and God knows what else. I know some of you are thinking 'But why can't you combine all of those, it works fine for me?' That's the problem, it's me. I don't know how to use my time effectively and I just want to quit PlayStage, adding huge amounts of spare time, to figure out how to do that. Maybe I'll learn how to use my time effectively one day and perhaps I'll return to Playstage then, but for now I just want to put it away and get started with a new life.

I'm going to save this piece of text for now and see if I have anything to add to it some other time, I don't feel like I explained my problem well enough. So I'm off to bed for now, probably lying awake thinking about things to write and about a damn title for this post.

Part 2

It's one day later now and it's daytime. This time I'm writing around 4.20PM, which is about 12 hours later than part one. I'm not going to adapt or delete anything from part one since I remember writing something about original texts being most truthful and all of that.

So yeah, I'm quitting. Ever since my mother died I've been thinking a lot more about life and what I'm doing with it and I've come to the decision that this is not what I want to do with my life at the time. I should pay attention to stuff that's more important, like maintaining my guitar skills, seeing my friends more often and studying a whole lot more. I want to play video games again instead of reading about them, I want to watch more movies since I discovered the 'alternative' genre and I just want to discover some new stuff to do in my spare time. Who knows, I might even start doing some kind of sport to get rid of this laziness, although the chances of that happening are quite slim. I'm not the kind of guy that can do a whole bunch of things at once and so the time consuming habit of looking for game news has prevented me from doing other stuff.

You may be wondering why I didn't announce this earlier (you know, since it first occured to me that I should quit). Well, obviously because I want to quit and if I had told about it earlier, some of the crew would have tried to change my mind, I'm dead sure of that. I don't want that, I want to quit. The only way of succesfully (or at least I hope it will be succesfull) stopping is just saying: 'And now I quit' instead of announcing you will quit and then still writing some stuff that makes you wonder if this is indeed the right choice. It's useless wasting time discussing with other people why I should or should not quit, it's my choice and no one is going to change my opinion anymore.

Sorry if I sound aggressive or anything, that's really not my intent. Anyway, I think I should be closing off around now, it's really not much use writing any more about this. I just want to say that I may return to Playstage one day, when I have learned how to go on with my time. For now, I'm going to use the spare time that went into Playstage and the online game news community to do other stuff. What stuff, I don't know. But I've said that numerous times, so that's it. Please read the Vincent post again and think about it in this context, that's why I put it here in the first place.

Thanks for the wonderful time at Playstage, I hope to return there soon since it's really the best Belgian gamesite. Keep it up, frame some ass for me.