May… wow. I don’t even know where to begin with what was wrong with that month.

I basically took the entire month off from just about everything. I quit Utopia by disappearing from it entirely. To understand why, it’s important to have a little background on what it is, why I was playing it, and why I felt it was necessary to quit.

Utopia is an online largely text-based strategy/role-playing game. The concept is that you have a province that you manage which is a part of a kingdom of other provinces run by other people. These kingdoms, in turn, fight each other, ally with each other, and otherwise interact with each other. I liked Utopia for the strategy - you had to know some math to really understand the mechanics of the game, there was a lot of game strategy involved in winning wars between kingdoms, and it was just a good way to kill some time.

I originally got back into it late last year during a lull at work - I needed something to kill time at work and at home when I had nothing better to do, and I had a lot of spare time on my hands at that point. Brian (my son) had just left my house to stay with his mom and I needed a good excuse to have some quiet time at home, among other things, and Utopia definitely fit the bill.

There are, however, some fundamental problems with Utopia:

1. You have to log in at least once a day to stay “active”. Failing to do so will, after a while, get you marked “inactive”, which will lead to your kingdom razing your province to the ground to make way for an “active” province.
2. When you’re not logged in, it’s generally good form to be available by IM at just about all possible hours of the day so that, if someone in your kingdom needs your help with something, you can provide it.
3. There are plenty of opportunities to lose time on Utopia, including alliances, becoming monarch of the kingdom, etc.

At first, these issues weren’t big problems. #1 was tricky since I go out of town every month, but I found ways around that - sometimes I would go into “vacation mode”, which puts your province in an inactive state for a few days, or I just wouldn’t log in and apologize to the monarch afterwards. #2 was somewhat challenging, but once I realized I could IM at work, that problem was solved. #3, well, I saw that as a feature, not a bug - the entire idea was to kill time, after all.

Then, a few things started to go wrong…

I became monarch of my kingdom. That alone kills way too much time - now you go from logging in once a day to logging in at least three times a day. Suddenly, vacation mode wasn’t really an option - I was the one in charge, so I couldn’t take vacations. I found myself specifically looking for motel rooms with wireless internet access so I could play a stupid game. Then came my alliance duties… I very quickly found myself spending 50% of my awake time logging into Utopia, logging into the alliance forums, answering IMs, visiting Utopia-themed IRC channels, and then wondering why I didn’t have enough time at work to get anything done and why my girlfriend was getting ticked that I was ignoring her. Worst yet, I somehow wasn’t spending enough time to be “active”. There was always something to do - some province that needed strat help, some kingdom that was bugging us, some alliance matter to attend to, and if I didn’t take care of it within 6-8 hours, it was because I “wasn’t active enough”.

Then came May.

By the time May rolled around, I accrued at least four days of after hours work. I did a lot of “off-the-clock” stuff to make up for the time I was supposed to be spending at work actually doing something and instead was playing Utopia and IMing strangers in Europe. Simply put, I was burning the candle at just about every end imaginable and was getting rather stressed out from it.

One day, something happened. I spent the entire day away from Utopia because work was consuming all of my attention, followed by some social activities… and felt great. So, I spent another day away from it - left my IM clients off, avoided IRC… and felt great.

This brings me to why I was away from my blog in May. I spent the month decompressing and focusing on what was important, which was most certainly not work and absolutely not some teenagers with far too much spare time trying to drain my time and energy away on a game with steadily dwindling participation numbers. Now, I’m focusing on getting some stuff accomplished, including getting some work done and doing things that I enjoy… like blogging. I enjoy ranting and raving out here. It’s fun.

In the meantime, I’m going to clean up some links, add some new ones on the left, and just generally get this house in order here. Expect more soon.