I suspect that not many of the people who choose to watch me here on deviantART are readers of the tech news site OSNews. I think DeviantART and OSNews are two very different things and I suspect most people on DeviantART watch me for artwork rather than my news commentary.

However, it has to be said that for the last few years, OSNews has been home to me, both as my home page, and the website that I most felt at home in. The website has that intangible "homely" feel to it, in the way it operates, in the choices of articles and even the trolls are all unique to the website. It is, how I see it, quite a nice website and community.

The numbers say I rank pretty highly in the user base, and I suspect that a lot of people are aware of my presence there. That has never affected how I conduct myself on the website, thankfully OSNews doesn't suffer PVs-syndrome like dA can sometimes. I've even received a great amount of praise from readers over my contributions.


So yesterday I decided to leave OSNews and disable my account.

The site's admin asked me if it was because of trolls, or another user's conduct - and the answer to that is no. (Although I'm flattered that he would be concerned about my welfare on the site).

Simply put, you can't have too much of a good thing. And in the case of the Internet, it's very easy to have too much of a good thing. I've found that my whole life has been spent online for the last 6/7 years. Almost every day I've been online, and I was always whittling away the hours working on some project or other. And whilst I felt productive for a while, that no longer persists.

I have come to the point where I am inhibited by an obsessive compulsive behaviour to be constantly checking the sites I frequent for updates. Refreshing a page even when I know it hasn't changed. I end up wasting an unholy amount of time being lodged in debates here and there.

What I want, is to be a better person. I would be the first to say that online I am sarky, quick to comment and very opinionated. This isn't true of my behaviour IRL, and whilst I'm successful on OSNews, it's come to the point that I realise that I can gain more than I could lose by moving on and dealing with the important matters in real life.

The same may eventually come of DeviantART.




Kroc Camen.