The question of whether festivals and hoods interfere with groups and roleplay is beginning to drive me out of what little mind I had left. OF COURSE THEY ALL INTERFERE WITH ONE ANOTHER. How could they NOT interfere?

So what?

There are only so many minutes in a week. A person needs to eat and sleep (in a bed, not at the computer) and he or she needs to do things like earn money, take care of the kids, go to Sunday dinner at mom's, do the laundry, go to the grocery store…whatever.

Time spent doing useless things like going to the job that pays you money (to buy a new and better computer) or visiting Mom or playing with the baby is time not spent at AncientWorlds or working on things for AncientWorlds.

It does not matter whether you can spend four minutes at AW per week, or four hours or forty hours or every waking minute: the time you have to spend on things related to AW is finite. You cannot expand the clock (unless of course you have access to some alien device at Area 51).

Time spent working on festival events or creating a quiz is time NOT spent hosting a chat session, writing a journal entry, creating graphics for the hoods, researching for the hoods, working on an academic post or article, stirring up activity in a group or writing an RP post or a segment of an interactive story.

So please stop pretending that festivals don't take time from other things people could be doing. Please stop pretending that the hoods don't dilute the effort people can give to groups or chatting. Yes. These activities all interfere with each other.

Again: so what?

This doesn't mean festivals are wrong. It doesn't mean the hoods are wrong. It doesn't mean groups are dead or that RP is gone from the internet. It means that people have to make choices as to what they WANT to do at AW--because they only have so much time they can devote to online activities in any given week.

"Every" thing cannot be the "highest priority" thing. You have to make a choice on where you are going to place your personal effort. And you have to accept the fact that just as you get to make YOUR choice of focus, other people also get to choose what they prefer to do.

What makes AW so GREAT is that we have so MANY choices. They exist. YOU choose what you want to do. We are lucky Jot has staged AW as a place for us to do all these things. But unless or until he figures out how to breach the time/space continuum… we are all still going to be limited by how many actual minutes we have to work on AW in a given week.

You can't do it all, no matter WHAT Gloria Steinem had to say. So make your choices and be happy you have so many choices to make. And stop criticizing other people because they don't choose the same thing you choose!