Tenth

By now most of you will have seen that the first two entries in the 'write an article' competition have been posted, mine being one of them. If you haven't read it yet, then I encourage you to go read it. Now.

Done that? Good.

I suppose I should feel some guilt for breaking the site - I'm sure it caused certain parties some extra work they could no doubt have done without - but I'm not really guilty. The fact that my article has been linked on slashdot and joystiq just means that we'll be drawing more and more people's attention.

This is a good thing.

Monday was a local holiday here in Scotland. This meant I did not spend most the afternoon staving off boredom by trawling barely-safe-for-work content online, so the first I knew of this was when I checked my email this morning and found a message from Codemonkey telling me that after he'd posted my article, it was quickly linked to slashdot, which spelled temporary death for the site. I will not deny that this filled me with a immense feeling of satisfaction. I felt my ego uncurl itself and blink sleepily out from behind my eyes, "Ahmagadz!" it mumbled, "I'm famous on teh interwebz?" then he curled back up and fell asleep (I hadn't actually showered or had coffee at this point in the morning). I dragged my girlfriend in and made her read the email. She was horrified at first that I'd brought the website down, "Does that mean it's...gone? Are you in trouble?" The poor thing, she'd only been up 15 minutes more than I had. After reassuring her 2old2play was indeed safe for now. she brightened up considerably after seeing how many people had read the article.
Or at least clicked on a link to it and scanned it - I'm not that stupid.

Anyway, I suppose my point is that I am happy people may have read my article. I have always wanted to write for a living, but I've never found the time to develop what skills I have, until recently, when I took the decision to rectify the situation. This coincided with the 2o2p writing contest.
I'll need to check my...friend's... Alanis Morrissette collection to see if that could be called ironic. As for my writing skills themselves; I wouldn't say I'm exactly a diamond in the rough; perhaps anthracite, I'm not sure. Regardless, the sure and certain knowledge that there are real people who have read something that I have written is a strange feeling. A very good feeling, but a strange one nevertheless. Far stranger was the feeling I got when I read people agreeing with me and complimenting the article itself.

I like to think I'm a reasonably intelligent person, I knew for a fact there would be plenty of people out there willing to disagree with me. I was pleased to find out I was not wrong. And if any of them are reading this - yes, I know I used the wrong spelling of 'bare'. You can blame the spellchecker in OpenOffice for that one, not my teachers or my rank stupidity.

I think my girlfriend may be a little happier than I am about this. We've just made some changes to our daily lives that will see her going to college for a year to pursue a dream  of hers. She thinks that this little coup of mine is proof positive that I should do the same and try to write something epic, adventurous and profitable. I told her I'd stick with this blog for a while. She seemed content, as am I. This whole thing has left me happy, something I needed, since my guild in WoW kicked me out for making a stupid mistake I made last week last week. Kicked me out without warning, without any official advisement of it, and without any chance to defend myself or explain my actions. But I think I'll post about that next time - it will probably take up just as much space as this post, if not more.

I think I'll leave this now and sign off, it's almost bedtime here. I will sleep soundly tonight I think, dreaming of the possibilities that could lay before me, should I metamorphose into an 'Internet Personality' overnight. It won't happen of course, but surely that's what dreams are for ?