Thank you! Now it’s time to rethink my life.

Thank you for all your kind comments and emails. It’s a surreal experience, losing a parent. I knew him all my life but I don’t feel I really knew him at all. If I could rewrite history so I never moved to California and could have spent more time with my parents and my family, I would.
The past few months, since I’ve moved back to New England, have been some of the best. Getting to know my father again (though so briefly), being able to spend more time with my sisters, who, despite years of pleading, stubbornly refused to move to California (yes, Hillary, I finally did remember you lived in SF for a time 😛 But then you moved away!) Seeing cousins that were great friends when I was a kid but now only see when someone dies… The week I spent in New Hampshire was like living in some alternate present in which I’d had the sense to stay near my family instead of moving 2700 miles away.
Now I’m back. Playing EQ2, working on the Swords of Destiny quests, raiding, playing Shapeshifter (and I now have a new blog dealing just with that so I won’t bore people here with that anymore. But if you want to see someone working through NP-hard problems in computer science via puzzles in Neopets, hey, give it a look. I’ll soon also be working on a program that illustrates how Edna’s Haunted Mansion adventure can be treated as an example of the famous Traveling Salesman problem.)
I’ll be back posting regularly very soon. However, though I will be still posting frequently about EQ2, I’m not going to be shy anymore about posting about other things. So yeah, there’s going to be more TV and movie stuff, a lot more about the books I’m reading. I like EQ2, but in the end, do you want to look back on your life and say, I’m sure glad I spent those years playing MMOs?
The couple of years I was unemployed and playing MMOs pretty much all day — are gone. I was mired in depression and I really needed help and I did not get it from EQ. All my friends in EQ couldn’t help me in real life.
Person after person came to me last week and told me how much my father meant to them, all the things he had done, all of his many interests, how he had made a difference in their lives.
When I come home from work each day, I don’t log into EQ. Right now, all my free time is spent working on solving Shapeshifter. I have learned SO MUCH from the effort — I’m thinking of new algorithms all the time, working on all that stuff I didn’t pay attention to in college, my programming (which I get paid to do, after all) is improving, and I feel more alive than ever when I am developing a new algorithm and know I am programming like I was 20 again.
I designed a game a few months ago, a game I thought I could use to get into the game industry — not so much to make a million dollars from, but to show I could write a game. I couldn’t implement it. My skills were rusty. But now they are sharp, getting that diamond edge. MMOs (I have said this) make me stupid. They also take valuable time.
And time is something we all have little enough of.
So as I branch out, my blog will branch out. When I started WK, there were very few EQ2 blogs — there was EQ2-Daily, Aggro Me, Stargrace’s, MrrX’s and a couple of others. Lean times. Now EQ2 is back on the rise, there are lots of EQ2 blogs (most of which are better than mine), and I personally feel there’s little general interest in what my characters are doing day to day in EQ2 (especially from my sister, Hillary, who shames me by leading an interesting and fulfilling life) (I only keep mentioning her because she’s the only person in my family who actually reads my blog (though she finds it dull), and if I can’t even make my blog interesting to my own family, well, I am doing something wrong.)
I will gladly once more give opinions on MMO game design after I have worked on an MMO and know what I’m talking about.
 

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