Happy Halloween and a fond farewell (for now)

To all my friends at SG-

Happy Halloween! Given the nature of this e-mail, the timing is appropriate. I'm just going to get the bad news out of the way first and follow with the explanation of why. I'm not sure if you figured this out by now, but I believe the time has come for me to bid a fond farewell to Sarcastic Gamer. I love you all, I want to stay in touch and I'll visit when I can, but I just have too many plates spinning on poles or whatever metaphor you want to use for "too freaking busy" right now.

As some of you know, one of my other hobbies involves paranormal investigations, or ghost hunting if you want to use the more common term. It's a rush, it takes you places you never would have gone otherwise, it encourages you to learn all kinds of cool local folklore stories, and in the end my desire is to help people who have gone through experiences they can't explain.

Almost ten years ago, my ex-wife and I moved into our first apartment together. We were the only family living in the four-plex building at the time. About a month after we moved in, stuff got real. Voices in other rooms, when you'd go to see if the TV or a radio was on, they would abruptly stop as you entered the room. Footsteps in the attic moving between our apartment and the one next door (which, as stated, was empty). Misty shapes showing up in photos. A ball of blue light streaking past my head towards a bedroom that was being used as makeshift storage. A 5-lb bottle getting picked up and thrown at me, stopping just short of hitting me. I tried my best to "debunk" everything, and while there were some weird things that happened that I'm not mentioning because I feel I proved them to be normal, there was quite a bit I could not disprove.

I contacted a local investigation group, and while they never did come up to investigate, they instructed me on how to debunk and capture evidence on my own, which started me down the path I'm on today. Since then I've come face-to-face with a full-body apparition, heard a little ghost girl giggle, recorded dozens and dozens of disembodied voices on recording devices, and had many other encounters in my pursuit of understanding. I could write pages on what has happened to me just this month that I couldn't find a plausible explanation for.

I used to think that you had to believe in "the other side" for things to happen, like entities would only spend energy on someone who wasn't going to just dismiss them outright, but I've since learned this is not true. I want to help people having these experiences understand what they're going through and how to deal with it, depending on the situation and their attitude towards it. The past several months I've been spending less time playing games and more time reading up on cases and theories. I now have a group that takes things very seriously, something I've been unable to find in other places I've lived. Oddly enough, we all went to the same high school.

Two members of our group are the brothers-in-law of Grant Wilson, the co-founder of The Atlantic Paranormal Society (TAPS), who's group was already doing great things when they were approached about letting a film crew follow them on their investigations, which is now Ghost Hunters on SyFy channel. If you've never heard of it, check it out on Hulu or SyFy.com. South Park has even parodied them with an episode earlier this month. They grew up in a house that had a lot of odd activity, and after their sister married Grant (years before the TV show) he introduced them to the scientific approach to investigating.

The past several weeks I've been working all day at my day job, then going home at night and spending another 5-8 hours on trying to set up our group's new website. I would give the URL, but it is not public yet.

While that project is nearing a "working" state---we're still adding a ton of content, but it's a usable design---I'm then building out a PHP database and writing another site for a business we're using as a "cash cow" to fund our equipment. From there, I'll be building another huge website that we aim to use as a smörgåsbord of information on all things paranormal. Our goal is to have this major site ready beta-tested and ready for release by August 2010. Since I'm the only PHP developer and experienced writer in the group, you can guess who will be doing 90% or more of that site.

So, in the tradition of Lono and Harley, although I know I won't be as missed, I must take my leave of Sarcastic Gamer to pursue building my own nitch in the world. I'm not going to make a forum thread or write some big "goodbye" post. I just want to quietly bow out, leaving only this blog post in my wake.

I appreciate SG and all it stands for, and I can only hope that I've given back to the SG community as much as I've gotten out it. As I said, I'll still keep checking in and you can always reach me on Facebook. This was not an easy decision for me to make, but I'm hoping that once all three sites are up and running at full strength, I'll have more time to come back.

Love you all, keep up the good work.

-OMG - the OldMarriedGamer, aka Chris.