I was asked recently by one of my elder co-workers how much time I spend online a day. One or two hours they guessed? Hah! I honestly couldn’t tell them (nor would I want to).
It’s kind of difficult to explain to some people that a computer is for more than just gaming or surfing social networking sites. You can easily look at my Steam stats and see what games/apps I’ve been playing and how much time I spend in them. But that’s not all that I do when I’m on here. I do a lot of things that can’t be done in just “one or two hours”.
If you couldn’t tell by reading my blog I follow a lot of things. Sometimes technical, political or whatever stupid thing happens to be taking place (making fun of Facebook like every other day). I have a lot of interests. I follow a lot of sites (RSS or not). I enjoy playing with HTML when I’m in the mood (phpBB would even fall under this category), I also like making movies in Source Filmmaker and Adobe products. I can easily spend several hours doing those alone! That and of course gaming. But even then that can be divided up too. Since I like looking at things from the gamers perspective and the server side perspective depending on the game. For example I like playing with and putting together servers because 1, it’s fun and 2, it’s a learning experience.
I also like looking at modifications and addons. One of the reasons why I liked doing You Can’t Do That On XBox was because I enjoy looking at what people create. Be it good or bad. People are always reviewing new games that are coming out or what game or DLC the companies will be releasing next, which is fine and good. But you don’t really get to see what people mod for PC games (although platforms like Steam have been doing a good job showing these things off in their own right). I’ve shown an interest in this stuff since the early days of DOOM. I still have some old custom WAD files on Floppy discs somewhere around here.
I can do all of this and still manage to go to work, go out partying, or any other real life obligations. So I’m pretty sure my digital polymath antics are not getting in the way of anything. Find your balance.