At long last, the saga of my hard disk is at an end.

Here’s a summary of the highlights:

• Built a whizz-bang Half Life 2 killing PC at the start of the year consisting of 2x 160gb SATA drives
• Six weeks ago, whilst doing normal windows clicking, everything freezes
• Reboots fail. Panic sets in. “Cyclic Redundancy failure” becomes a common term.
• Realise my primary drive is about to die. Commence backing up everything in sight.
• Speak to vendors who give me a returns number.
• Waste loads of time but finally get HDD and connecting cable back to vendor.
• Wait
• Wait
• Wait
• Phone vendor and nag. Vendor suddenly realises they can’t replace drive so offer a different drive.
• Get drive 2 days later – minus connection cable
• Frustration sets in
• Lots of phone-calls, lots of hold music.
• Get through on three separate occasions. Am promised sodding connection cable on three separate occasions
• A full week after the drive turns up, the cable turns up.

Rubbish service isn’t it? Although the drive I got last week looks absolutely spanking new it wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest to learn it’s duff.

So, I’m geeking out tonight, opening PCs and playing with partitions. My remaining drive has been working really hard and, seeing as it was my second drive with heaps of data on it, I just added a new partition to it to plonk the OS on it. Having XP and a paging file three partitions in on your system is a good way of dropping performance. If you ever feel like your machine is running too efficiently I seriously recommend copying my example.

Based on some of the feedback I’ve read recently it seems that my actions still confuse some people. I don’t really feel that I need to explain myself to anyone but being misunderstood is annoying.

The Society was made with very clear intentions and goals in mind. I had some private goals that meant a lot to me. My other forum, KWoT, was set up as a result of being tired of internet forum politics. It was a forum with only one rule “Don’t make hassle for the sake of making hassle”. It was totally unfocused and no topic was taboo. Many entertaining and interesting discussions went on. I will always be proud of what KWoT was and, in it’s active 4-year life no admin intervention was ever required. No bannings, no arguments, no deletions, no hostility. It was all that I’d wanted it to be. My personal goals with The Society was to have a similar attitude of respect and enjoyment. I fully intended never to ban users or lock topics. So, the recent events that occurred at The Society and the subsequent methods of controlling them resulted in my goals failing and my attitude towards the site changing drastically. That’s why I have nothing more to do with the site or with how it is run. I still think it’s overall aims and standards are intact and that it serves it’s purpose. I will always be proud to have been involved in it’s birth.

The goings on at The Society are by no means the only factor that made me reconsider my attitude to gaming forums. My wife helps me to summarise it best. She said “It’s a shame you’re not doing what you enjoy so much”. Which would be true – but in an extremely short space of time I stopped enjoying it and started hating it and the type of personalities I was associating myself with.

My free time is limited and I’m not going to spend it doing something I don’t enjoy anymore. It’s as simple as that.

Receiving comments saying “You can’t go – you’re a part of the place” or “You need to come back – we want you!” is totally missing the point. What other people may want is of no interest to me any more. Certainly when my generosity has been taken advantage of! I’m not going to have a sulk and demand respect or give orders but the sooner people realise that acting rude and selfishly towards other people isn’t really going to endear them to you or make you interested in what they want the better. I’m very fortunate that there are people that I’ve encountered that like me enough to say nice things about me in my absence. It means a lot. However, it can only serve as a lesson to others to not abuse something and then miss it when it’s gone. If you kick your pet every day it’s going to run away. On a more selfish note, my actions are about me – other people stating that I should do this or that because they’d prefer it that way are really only showing me how much they’re missing the point.

What I do know is that this is only a temporary thing. I’ve seen communities come and go and high-profile members come and go. It seems a big deal at the time but it isn’t anything major. I certainly don’t plan on returning to any communities in the foreseeable future – but they’ll march on happily enough. They always do.