Not quitting. Moving. Closing this shop, opening a new one.
I thought long and hard to come up with a meaningful metaphor.
Imagine you run a baking shop. Imagine it is a good baking shop, by your standards anyway. You aren’t making millions, you don’t have a massive chain. It’s just you, the sole owner/proprietor/employee, in some small town somewhere. You have, say, eight thousand or so regulars, most of which you remember by name.
Time goes by. Years in fact. You bake and you bake and you bake.
You experiment sometimes. Make a bagel at least half your customers fall in love with immediately. Dip your toes into doughnuts, though a Tim Hortons opens up just down the way and forces you out of that particular market. It doesn’t matter though, your customers never abandon you.
Sometimes you take sick days, and there’s that one time you were accidentally caught up in a hilarious spy romcom starring Brad Pitt as Johnny Depp’s unwitting gay lover.
Many years in, you can feel a weight. You’re not sure what this weight is, but you can feel it. Just… a remote pressure, gently squeezing you and increasing in intensity over the course of several weeks.
You finally recognize it as a book closing. Your book. The book of the bakery.
The bakery, you see, is coming to an end.
It’s not that you suddenly dislike baking. It’s not that you suddenly don’t enjoy it or became particularly bad at it.
Something, somewhere, shifted. And now the bakery is ending.
You think about becoming a florist.
You decide to go with it.
Baking is done, now it’s all about floral arrangements.
But, you see, you can’t use the same name or the same store.
You see, cause that name, that name is a bakery. That store saw the creation of confectionaries and delightful pastries and yes, even wholesome loaves of bread from time to time.
You can’t change that, you can’t retcon it into something it isn’t. It is, and always will be, a bakery. You can’t morph it into a florist. You can’t simply remove the ovens and replace it with a greenhouse.
The bakery has become something beyond you. It has sprung from you, created a life for itself, lived and reveled as its own entity.
I can’t bring myself to kill it.
I can’t bring myself to take it out back and shoot it.
It is what it is, and shall remain so.
By opening a new place, I create something that has no history. No past, no personality. A true tabula rasa, a blank slate. A solid square of marble, untouched by the chisel.
Critical QQ is something that has already been forged, grown and developed, matured, battle hardened.
You cannot return a painting to the blank canvas it once was.
Solution?
Get a new canvas.
And with that, I proudly present Preposterous Pretentious Prattle (threepr for short), my new canvas.
I am unsure where this new place will take me. I have freedom here, total and unchecked. We shall see.
I’m not particularly fond of, nor good at, goodbyes or thanks, which is why I haven’t posted any.
What would I say? How would I thank the loyal legions?
I’d be all…
Gnomeaggedon. You are an absolute blast, in every sense of the word.
Krizzlybear. WEEABOOOOO!!!
Larisa. YOU’RE OLD.
(Seriously, if you got all us mages together, Larisa would be the kindly, grandmotherly figure everyone genuinely liked. Except, you know, don’t mess with granny, cause piss that harmless old woman off and you will be embraced with liquid streams of absolute death.)
Pike. Man, I don’t even know what to say. You and your fellow nerds-with-uterii cause my higher brain functions to fail at extremely inopportune moments daily. Fucking baller is what you are.
Rilgon. I honestly found you first as a commenter in MMO-Champ. I would actually scroll through MMO-Champ threads specifically to read your comments. Then I said “I bet this guy has a totally kickass blog.” I WAS RIGHT.
Saresa. In honour of warlocks such as yourself, every six months I level one to twenty and then delete it whilst cackling.
Do you want to delete Lolbutts, level 20 warlock?
HAHAHAHAHA YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS
Megan. I’d let you corpse camp me any day. If you know what I mean. And I mean SEX.
Jong. See what I said to Megan. SERIOUSLY.
… DO YOU SEE HOW HORRIBLE THIS WOULD BE. Who wants to read like several thousand words of this?
It would take multiple days to thank everyone individually, and I would still miss people!
I mean, I’d probably fucking thank my goldfish from third grade before I remembered I forgot to thank my own mother. The stress would be unbearable. I’d be sitting here going “did I thank Tam? did I send that note to Grimmtooth? what about that e-card to Rhii? did I remember to mana-bonk theerivs? oh god what about repgrind, better double check!”
And then I’d reread like ALL THREE THOUSAND WORDS (volume one of forty nine) just to see if I missed someone, and I’d run out of paper, and I’d start writing names down in blood on my desk just to make sure.
Nobody wants that.
Critical QQ 