I started working in september. "Real" life has kept me from being here regularly. I was hired for something between social and legal work for a half time but the organisation was also looking for someone to handle the communication (I haven't studied that). I started to do it for one newsletter. Now I'm handling project calls, facebook, twitter, website, newsletter and yearly report next to the legal and social work I'm doing. If it wasn't for my experience with organising stuff and speaking in clear words in this clan, I would have had a much more difficult time. Thanks to you I know how to find words quickly and eloquently.

I have been dreaming of writing a book for a long time. If I ever manage, I have you to thank, among others. My salutations.

In this blog entry I'll tell you the story of how this gaming clan made me meet with total strangers, delivered me a bright yellow "F|A Clan Co-Leader" T-shirt and made me invite a guy in my home who used to kill me several times a day on the server.

First there's Hamburg. How do you set up a real life meeting? It's simple. You make a topic on the forums, make a poll about the meeting place and date, someone books a hotel and... You meet there.

Or do you now? Our good friend Raziel was the one booking the hotel, you see. And this nice mister had disappeared from our good earth. So we ended up looking for a new hotel for Destiny and Guardian and I ended up at the strangest camping site I have ever encountered (there was no grass for the tents, but stones).

Once we all found a place to sleep, Kowalski was ready to show us the city of Hamburg. We ate some weird fish burgers at the port, took some pictures for the rest of the clan and ate ice cream, bathing in the sun. It was all really fun. My only complaint was that DJ, Destiny, Kowalski nor Guardian were pretty girls but eh... You can't have everything! DJ bought us cookies and this is also where DJ told me I was promoted to co-leader! Quite strange hearing about clan stuff from a real life DJ :p. As if that ain't enough for the strangeness, I received a yellow "F|A Clan Co-Leader" T-shirt in my letterbox a few days later. How often do you get those from your other friends, huh?!

At night we went for drinks. We took some extra beers to the port and stayed there talking until 4 am. What do gamers talk about? Yeah, sure. Games. Clan gossip. But also politics (it's allowed on those meetings!), life, girls,... The advantage about having no girls in the company is... You can talk about them.

When Guardian and Destiny went home I stayed a little longer to visit the Schanzenviertel with Kowalski. It's a really cool "slum" (see picture). Last year I returned him the favor and showed him Ghent. I have a feeling we may meet again.

Eh, I can't tell you everything in one blog entry so you'll have to hear about the other international encounter in the next part

My reason why I am still in a gaming clan is very particular. Indeed, it all started with gaming. I played the game enemy territory and had lots of fun with my real life friends. During my exams I went looking for other servers to take a short break. I ended up on nq2, where I played with some regulars who wanted to play objective-based, balanced games. We decided to join FA, first purely to be able to use !put to even the teams. We moved to nq3 and things shifted from gaming to talking. We all joked together late evenings during what we called "specparties". We became friends.

When I had difficult times in my life, I had the luxury to have two friend groups to help me trough. When my real life friends grew tired of my nagging, my friends on the server were there for me. To give sense to my existence during those difficult times and to thank this second group of friends, I started helping out a lot on the forums. I was the one making gameday posts, I made some tutorials and so on. Years later here I am, a leader of a gaming clan. Unplanned and never desired.

The lesson I learned from this experience and I want others to learn from it is this: you can never give too much to people who earned your respect. You will get back what you gave a thousandfold. Not only literally because these people will give you what you gave them, but also because you start feeling better about yourself when you help people. I decided to repeat the engagement I made online in my real life by doing volunteer work. As a result I now understand a lot more about the world and the people in it, my languages have improved and I get respect from people who know what I'm doing.

Be ambitious in everything you do in your life. When you lived your life, it will always be incomplete but at least you can say you took everything there was to take. To me (and of course this is personal), the time I spend gaming is better spent being part of a clan made up of beautiful, motivated people. That way you can help out and when you need it, eventually you will get something back.