Mara Sov and her Awoken survive the transition back to our solar system, but the trip leaves much of their technology in ruins. Now, they must find refuge in a Reef of asteroids and derelict Golden Age ships where they can rebuild their technology and their numbers.

Previous: 48: Departure
Next: 50: The Plight of Earth

Should I keep the local archive updated, or do you want me to simply route that back to you?

I had planned to write a long explanation about this change in format and location, but my entire morning got taken away from me. Short answer: Sure, keep the archive updated. Long answer: I've got more to say... and will hopefully have time to say it tomorrow. :)

- No text -

Really? Eh.. ok. I mean... that's good, considering the distant target I'm aiming at.

The long and the short of it is I enjoy writing. I enjoy doing reviews. I enjoy doing companion series like Bite-sized Backstory. Essentially, I enjoy helping people get more out of things they watch or play and I enjoy helping people find or avoid games or movies or what have you. DBO has been the home of Bite-sized Backstory for a few years now, and I don't intend to stop with that series. There's a lot more of Destiny to cover. But I want to do much more, and the DBOs forum aren't really a good place for the rest.

Longer term, I'd like to be paid to do this kind of stuff. Reviews. In-depth looks at lore. Etc. My website is intended to be part resume. That payment might come in the form of an actual job or, more likely, in the form of something like a Patreon. But I don't want to just throw my hand out without some solid examples of what I can do. And I wanted to have some place to practice and refine my work for a while before asking anyone to pay for it. I'm currently planning on a time table of at least a year before I ask anybody to pay me anything.

Already, I have all of Bite-sized Backstory up on the site. But I also have a few instance of my fiction. And some reviews. And all of these categories and more will grow substantially in the coming months.

For instance, right now I'm chipping away at coming up with a good general format for a companion series to the Macross Frontier anime. Macross as a whole is a long running series with a pretty consistent timeline spanning multiple shows and movies. And, Macross Frontier contains a lot of subtle and not so subtle references and callbacks to past works. To really understand it all you'd have to watch some 100+ episodes before starting Frontier. So, I'm going episode by episode and giving impressions and overviews and clearing up the occasional hanging plot thread along with providing specific, time-coded references to things that a non-Macross fan could easily miss. I'm still playing with the format pretty heavily, I want a layout that is easy to read and makes sense to repeat 25+ times or use for other series in the future, but this is something I've wanted to do for a while and something that just has no place here at DBO.

It's also clear that sites like DBO aren't the congregation points that they used to be. Back in the prime of halo.bungie.org, HBO was kinda the one place to go for Halo news and speculation and fan works. There were a few other sites like Forward Unto Dawn that appeared over time, but for a long while HBO was it. With Destiny and with the passage of time and with the rise of social media and extremely highly focused groups on reddit, fan sites like this just don't have the traffic or influence they once did. We're a pretty tight knit community here now with not a whole lot of newcomers anymore, ya know. And even fan sites did still have more influence, the occasional off-topic game review is one thing. A constant stream of content is something that just doesn't belong. Plus, a forum system like this really limits discovery. It takes a good bit of extra work to link the navigation of Bite-sized Backstory here in the forums, and I have to have mods go back in and link the past episodes to the new ones. Imagine trying to easily find all the game reviews I've post here. There's a few... but there's no easy way to locate them without reading through the titles of every post I've ever made over the past 6ish years.

Circling back to Bite-sized Backstory, it was born here at DBO and it has a concise archive linked off the Front Page which I'm super happy to have continue running. I'm also happy to post links to new Bite-sized Backstory articles here for everyone that supported it so far. I considered continue posting the full text here, but I think there's a little something to be said for keeping all my future work in the same place where it is more easily to browse and discover. And for not doing the work twice to get it into two different formats. I'm still totally committed to the series. I haven't even touched the smaller stories like Thorn vs The Last Word or the surprisingly long running story of the Exo Stranger. And there's still this second half to the Awoken's origin story. Plus, I'd like to circle back around and maybe cover the story/stories of the Iron Lords, too. I'm still more than happy to respond to comments and discussion over here, as well. It would be kinda neat to get a comment over at my site from time to time too, though.

In the end, I'm doing this because it will help me do more things I enjoy in the future. :)

Essentially, I enjoy helping people get more out of things they watch or play and I enjoy helping people find or avoid games or movies or what have you.

This is what I appreciate most about your efforts. Keep up the great work!