User blog:Taldin/Service Restored With A Smile....

Three months is a long time to be exiled to the darkest corner of the Internet.

In late May, someone in our company (or hacking in the guise of our company IP) did something naughty enough to get our gateway IP blocked from the Wikiverse. Which meant I couldn't post, comment, or otherwise say anything from my primary place of doing work for Habitica --  all of my notes are here, the test server is installed here, and generally, I get my best writing done here.

When I'm home, my time between arrival and bed tends to be pretty filled, so being any sort of consistent with keeping up with the Wiki wasn't going to happen without making some contortionist level changes in my evening scheduling.

Between that, and dealing with my father passing away over the summer (and lots of travel to and from the East Coast), I really wasn't up to keeping up any sort of routine.

I decided to take a 'forced vacation' from working on the Wiki - stuck myself in the Inn on Habitica, and decided to test whether or not this was a habit I needed to keep.

The Wiki did not implode without me; Lady Alys is indefatigable, and other people stepped up to fill in the (not so giant) void I'd left. I'd been scaling back the amount of 'jump right on its' I'd been doing already, due to work eating my head, and so I wanted to see whether I missed being here.

When I started counting down the days before the ban was lifted on my IP, I knew I was coming back.

I wanted to be better. I wanted to be here. I missed the structure, the routines, and the reasons to write something, to make the world a better place.

One of the hardest things about being a Wiki Editor when there are so many good ones around now is that it's hard to find things to edit. So I've spent part of my exile time thinking up some good ideas on how to work with that. I -want- that 365 Wiki Hero badge, and I intend to shoot for it, this time.

The biggest idea? Is to actually create content. To not just be content to edit, but to conjure. We're adventurers on the road to self-improvement, and I'm a writer first and foremost. I talk about being a novelist, but my writer's block sometimes gets away with me. I'm working on some structured assignments for any given day of the week, so I have something to do besides finding loose punctuations and minor typos -- and I would be more than happy to invite some of you along on the trip.

This is the beginning, and the journey starts from here. I'm getting rid of all of my old Habits, using an orb of Rebirth, and starting from level 1. If I want to get control of my life again, it's more significant for me to do it wholesale.

Life is about change -- some change we have forced upon us, and some we choose. But sometimes? We're forced to choose change.

I choose to change for the better.

I've missed being here.

-Taldin