I really thought tonight was going to be the night.
I really thought I was going to go through with it.
Go ‘all the way’.
But it’s 5am, I didn’t. I’m not sure if I elaborated before, but my problem with sleeping isn’t so much going to sleep when I go to bed, it’s the fact I wake up during the night. I was sure that I was going to sleep through until the alarm went off at 11am today (I’m normally very good at sleeping in), alas the winds of fate (is that even a saying?) were against me and deemed I should wake up. At least I can take solstice in the fact it wasn’t me just waking up, for once.
I don’t think I’m pushing any envelopes when I say that I spend a lot of time on RPoL. Thinking about it, coding it, administering it, and, every now and then, a dash of playing in it. Over the past five years it’s dominated my life in one form or another, starting as a hobby and growing from there.
I’ve always harboured ideas to get more of a RP community going, and not RPoL centric, though it’d be nice to be considered the ‘hub’. Things like the IRC chat channel being #RolePlay not #RPoL and my offering of the chat code to another other site (not that they ever used it), to the upcoming RP news site; a user submission and moderated based page.
Whilst I opted out of coding as a profession so many years ago, I do enjoy molding the site into what the users (hopefully) want. I always enjoyed coding, I used to write silly programs just for kicks; but I got lazy, I was put off by the claim that I’d only code for a few years and then I’d go onto something like teaching, but ultimately I decided I didn’t want to sit in a room all day and code (misnomer or not). That’s why I went into technical consulting, going out to meet new people and solve their problems is great.
But RPoL’s such a beast now, my complete novice coding and decisions from five years ago are still there on the site, I’m slowly trying to migrate off as it really does make my life much easier moving to a mySQL database, plus I think the server has reached it’s performance limits without some serious disk caching and technology change. The current version has taken over a year to get here. There’s been lots of outside influences but ultimately it’s just one big beast. A very large change, a necessary one to release the performance bottlenecks, and I’ve got more stuff to go, lots more.
Administering, coding, and generally maintaining RPoL combined with my ‘build a community’ plan is just getting too big, it’s taking up far too much of my time.
Yesterday it dawned on me that I just can’t do it any more.
I can’t try and earn a living and commit the time I want to, that I need to, to the site. There’s so much to do, but not enough time in the day. I find myself coding RPoL more and more during the day of late and not developing my business, the thing that keeps me ‘comfortably well off’ (to quote Daffy Duck). It just doesn’t work, it can’t work, I need to focus on the very basic requirement, and (unfortunately for us all) that is making money.
And so, dear friends, associates, comrades, RPoLians and the general reader, I hope you’ll understand when I tell you I’ve decided to try and make a living off RPoL.
I have no idea how I’m going to do it. I can guarantee you, however, that it won’t include ‘you must pay to play’.
