my copy came in today.  actually it came a few days ago but i just now had time to pick it up today.

this is really nice.  i want to thank you a lot for doing something like this.  i was only vaguely aware he even wrote anything so finding out he wrote enough material for a small book (and more?) was a pleasant surprise.  the book itself is really big.  i was expecting it to be a normal-sized book and it's more akin to a children's book in terms of size.  that has nothing to do with anything but it was just an observation i made.

i am not very far in at all but so far it smacks of steel and this is about the best thing i could hope for!  it's been like a year since i regularly conversed with him, and i was kind of forgetting what he was like already.  this book could not have been written by anyone but him!  it sounds like him talking.  everything sounds like him.  turns of phrase and everything.  i didn't know any of this material existed so it's really great to be reading something entirely new and unheard of from him.  it takes me back.  i know i can read it online, which is cool, but it's nice to actually hold it in my hands, and see his name on the cover.  so yeah, thanks a lot!  even though he apparently was not particularly happy with this specific work and IN LIFE probably would not have wanted everyone reading it, it was a great thing to do i think.  then again maybe he is cringing from beyond the grave as we speak.  who knows.

hey

i'm genuinely sorry if i was a dick, once upon a time.  i always vaguely regretted it, and i think i sort of talked steel into regretting it too after we both gave it some consideration, but what was left to say, really?  we talked about you more than a few times, even since you left, and while yes, he did think you were kind of dumb in your opinions, he always vocally thought you were a decent guy.  this counts for a lot, i think.  dumb opinions are fairly easily rectified, but being a generally bad and selfish person is not.  he saw value in who you were as a person where it counted.

i try not to think about him so much anymore.  sometimes i will see or think of something and make a mental note to tell him before i realize that he's dead.  i miss him as a person a lot, but i think i'm probably missing what he was to me more than i can really appreciate.  i can feel a tremendous gap in my interaction with other humans where he stood, as a friend and someone i learned countless things from.  it just hasn't been filled at all, and i can pinpoint times where i know he'd be there, if he was still anywhere at all.  but even in death, he taught me something.  before he died, we had a little conversation and he said something to the effect of, "panda, if i die, i want you to know i really valued our relationship over the years", to which i replied "yeah me too man, but don't sweat it, you're not going to die".  this was, of course, completely untrue in the end, but because i was so certain of it back then, i didn't say enough.  i didn't say, hey pal, you're one of the most important people in my life.  you've made me a better person.  you represent so much of what i want to be someday.  what i learned, and what you should learn too, is that too often we leave really, really important things unsaid.  the most important things.  and why? because being emotionally open can often be an awkward affair, especially with other guys, that leaves us vulnerable and exposed.

his death taught me not to hide so much from what i feel, and from what i know is true but never say.  these things you don't say will end up being some of your biggest regrets when things come to an end.  you know this now, as do i.  i wish i could tell him a lot, now, but i can't.  this is pretty awful and it nags at me from time to time, but not so much, because i know that some mistakes need not be repeated.  steel is far from the last person i will care for dearly in my life.  his final and arguably most important lesson was that i should love without fucking... embarrassment.  that it wasn't something i had to hide from the people i cared about.  that i should be more open, because shit can just end well before you expect it to and then you'll just be left with paragraphs of shit you wish to god you'd told them but didn't because it'd be one of those heh.....AWKWAAAARD guy-to-guy moments.

so now i'm more open and honest with people i know because who the fuck knows what will happen or how long you've got left, and if there's one thing i've learned from all this, it's that a little sheepish embarrassment is better than years of regret knowing that, as you said, perhaps this person i cared for so much went to the grave not knowing how i felt.  i fucked up by not telling him what he meant to me, but he's taught me that i should never hide my affection for others, and in this sense and probably many others, his death has value.  i know this is a very trite lesson to take from someone's death, but apparently at least the two of us needed to be taught it.  it's a little funny, and nice, that even after he died he's still causing us to be slightly less dumb day by day.

you're right, but even if we're not told how he was towards the end (sredni already said he was delirious; that tells me enough for me to know i don't want to hear more), i'd at least like to know how he was towards the end of his mentally functioning days.  i haven't spoken to steel in months, and we only have a handful of forum posts to go by for the past few months.  i've basically been out of the loop since july.  i don't need to know how he spent his october, because i'm sure it wouldn't be any kind of comfort, but knowing how he spent his july through september would be nice, since those were the last days he was STEEL as we knew him.  i mean, christ, i don't even really know how he died.  i'm not saying go into explicit detail about how much his condition degenerated in the last few weeks, but i feel like there's still a lot of non-morbid stuff we don't know.

I'll talk to Drule and see if we can open some of the archives up, as long as it isn't a server strain or whatever.

wouldn't want the server to be strained

ahaha, sorry, I always confuse you two when he mentions you.  aaaaa mentioned you.  that's going to take some getting used to.

that's a good story, though.  CLASSIC STEEL.  so was cooking with doop, for that matter.  it's good he left so much shit behind.

you know, it was just like 5 days ago that i reformatted and lost the photo of you and him with avril.  god, i wish i'd kept that now.

yeah, thanks a lot for posting that.  even if it's not NEWS or anything, it's good to hear from someone who knew him, and even better to know that you guys spent the last few hours with him telling stories.  that is the SMALL COMFORT i was looking for and i'm glad it was able to happen like that.

yeah i can't disagree with that at all.  in fact, i almost said something similar to whoever up there said WHAT PLAN COULD LEAD TO THIS, GOD??? because the immediately obvious answer is that his death seems to have impacted a lot of people here in a rather serious way.  in the time i knew him, he was... inspiring, i guess.  you could say the silver lining of his death is that it is no less resonant and inspiring than he was to me throughout our relationship.  that there is something to be TAKEN from this.  just, in a different, much more depressing way.  still, as much as i know that despite his death, his influence and the things i learned from him will stay with me, and in that way it's sort of like he's not entirely gone, i still know he is.  still dead.  i feel like anything else said is me trying to make myself feel better about it, even if it's true.  you're right, of course, but i know you know what i mean.  you start telling yourself, well as long as he remains in your heart he's not truly blah blah blah and then you tell yourself to shut up.  he's gone.  just gone.  dressing it up doesn't change it.  it's a bitter thing, for sure.

sitting here, though, i still can't help but feel that this whole thing was doomed from the start.  i used to wonder what would happen with our relationship, as the years went on.  it didn't feel like either of us could drift off and lose contact and just kind of forget about the other.  even at the time, i thought it would've had to be something abrupt.  now i know.

his family might need help with the funeral bills.  it's possibly more practical than what a lot of others would say, but they're going through enough shit right now, and i know his mother has been struggling to pay the medical bills for a long time.  nobody should have to lose a family member and then stress about financial shit at the same time.

god, his mom.  his MOM.  this is really awful on multiple levels.

i feel a bit weird calling him mark.  i know it was his real name and on one hand i know that using silly, hollow internet handles is kind of dumb.  but it wasn't just some HANDLE anymore.  i knew steel.  i learned things from steel.  i argued a lot with steel and i laughed at stupid childish internet shit with steel.  i'm a better person for having known steel.  it's not just some dumb handle.  STEEL is how i knew him.  the name mark doesn't mean anything to me.  steel was a friend.

i knew he'd go like this.  i really knew it'd be something stupidly realistic without any warmth or room for comfort at all.  no goodbyes, no final speeches, no meaningful words as he gazed into the unknown.  just, he kind of falls off the map and one night quietly dies and that's it.  he was one of the most charismatic people i've known and he deserved something more fitting than just drifting off in the middle of the night.

when i really think about it, it seems inevitable that he was going to die, and this thread over the past day or so proves that for me, sort of.  as stupid, childish, and naive as i feel about actually thinking this... i must have believed my life was some kind of fucking sitcom or something.  i never HONESTLY believed he would die.  no, of course he wouldn't.  that's not how things work.  not in ol jeff's life.  things will work out.  things most certainly did not work out.  i really regret being so goddamn immature about this because there were a lot of things i should have said about how i was glad to have known him that just... didn't because i didn't think it was necessary, and that is something that will stay with me, i think.

but it seemed obvious that he'd die, because look at this fucking topic.  he was such a great guy, so smart, so much potential, i learned so much from him, it goes on and on.  when do you ever hear that in conjunction with "and now he's off somewhere fulfilling his potential and giving back to the world"?  this is the truth of things and i managed to deftly avoid it for a year and a half without even realizing i was deluding myself.  in regards to treesock, he once said that her love of MAES HUGHS or whoever was a bit absurd, because the character was built to be liked.  he was so affable, so smart, so charismatic, so GOOD, that it was obvious that he'd been written only to be killed off and leave everyone watching with a staggering sense of loss.  this is steel, i've come to realize.  everything about him was too good.  too interesting, too intelligent, too admirable, even the bad parts, of which there were many, were generally born of passion, which i can't really fault.  it was like he was just some character someone created for the sole purpose of dying and leaving a great big hole in the lives of everyone who knew him so they could all stand around talking about how great he was and how much he could've done, and how it's not fair at all.  this almost feels like a goddamn comic book.  i don't know how i didn't see this coming.  it seems like everything he was to me was all consciously moving towards this one moment.  like that's the only place it could have gone.

it just struck me that i'm writing about how he was, and what he was to me.  this guy is actually dead.  it's still unreal.  writing about a dead friend.  we spent so much time talking to each other, even when we weren't both at gw.  hours and hours and countless conversations.  with how much i tend to keep people i know in life at arm's length, he was the person i confided in most, the person i went to advice to for most, the person i just shot the shit with the most.  i connected with him more than any other person i met at gw and i can honestly say that he was my closest friend.  that's a weird thing to say for a net pal but after i found out he was dead, i realized it was true.  i think we talked to each other more than we talked to anyone else from gw.  we were both online a lot, and he was my GO TO GUY to chat with if i had anything to say at all, and i know i was his.  he once said in some topic about some dumb shit that we were each other's echo chambers.  that was true.  fuck, man.  STEEL.

i'm really sorry sredni.  you were probably much closer to him than i was.  this is probably a lot harder for you.  if anything, i feel sort of guilty because i'm not even reacting here.  i went to work tonight and functioned on a normal level.  aside from everything seeming different on a fundamental level, like skewed, like the world had slightly shifted just a little bit, it was like nothing happened.  i feel like i should be crying or angry or something, but all i really feel is a dull sadness and a vague disbelief.  i keep forgetting he's dead, then suddenly remembering and every time it just feel like it can't really be true.  like i must just be imagining things.

i miss him a lot, though.  this really shouldn't have happened.

Hasn't hit me yet. Steel. Steel. It seems weird.

He was a really good friend, man. WAS. Jesus. I don't think I ever really believed he would die.

I don't understand, though. How did die? Was it the cancer, or something else?  Sredni, how was he towards the end? Alert? Drugged? Did he know he was going to die? Did he have anything to say?  Please, please tell me anything you can. Nothing new from him ever again. That's maybe the worst part. I didn't get to say goodbye or I really care about you or anything I know I should have said but didn't because it seemed weird and I didn't think he'd actually die. I don't know. I just want to know this one last thing. Something more than just, "he's dead".

so what's the deal?  it's been like two weeks since you've said anything at all and this topic is pretty much dead, which is kind of worrying given your last update.  soooo sredni maybe quit being a tool and tell us what's going on.  even if nothing's changed since your last update, it's good to know, at least.  it's frustrating having information that's so out of date when so much can change in a couple weeks.

i don't disagree and i feel like a jerk for raining on your parade!  i was legitimately hoping you'd reply with a rebuttal about how you found a lot of people in the community funny/interesting/intelligent/whatever else.  i kind of regret that we didn't realize it was time for a change of direction years ago when anyone still gave a shit, but what can you do?

The site will be focused on news, resources and creative input from the members. Users will be able to have all creative effort featured.

yeah, the problem with that is that it's been said several dozen times by many different people that the goal of this is to have an incredibly low-maintenance metablog that can be sustained by one or two people.  translation: not a whole lot of original content. 

you can SUGARCOAT this if you like but this is kind of a flawed way to approach making a new site.  NEWS isn't anything but a way to pad entries and make updates seem more frequent.  specifically: 1) nobody cares about news from a site that isn't on the inside or otherwise close to the industry.  the news would just come from OTHER SITES that people could just as easily read themselves.  it's a bullet point on a feature list.  2) original content is actually the complete opposite of what everyone seems to agree is a good idea to build the site around.  if it's run by a couple people as you say it will be, there will not be a whole lot of original content being generated, and if you are planning on looking towards gw at large to generate original content to post on an indie gaming blog, then i would suggest you look at the previous two front pages we've had and seriously reconsider.  3) what creative input from what members?  again, can't emphasize this enough, for the past year and a half we've had two iterations of a website that provided an avenue for this and the entire time it was an uphill battle to find anyone who wanted to say anything, more so in the past six months.  4) what creative effort?  how many creative efforts is gw producing these days?

you cannot consistently rely on three of those at all, yet you seem to be banking on them.  who's going to produce all this original content and give all this creative input?  the ONE OR TWO people who would run the site?  that's a heavy workload!  or is it the highly apathetic, unmotivated userbase who has consistently proven they don't want to generate either of those things?  the only thing you can actually rely on is NEWS POSTS about indie gaming, and that is a really worthless idea to build ANY site on, let alone an obscure, dying site that nobody visits whose community is disinterested in indie gaming news.

i'm not really sure how this will "cater to all members" at all.  isn't it supposed to be an indie gaming blog?  this is what you have said.  unlike ds i do not really think most people on gw even play indie games on a regular basis.  how is a blog that is quite deliberately focused on indie games (as in, in contrast to gw6 which was related to indie games in name only and most frequently was about IRANIAN PIRATES and facebook) and not general content going to cater to all members when very few care at all about indie games?

you should probably stop trying to be all things to all people because none of what you are saying is very realistic.  it'll be a blog focused on indie gaming without all the more general shit of previous blogs, but at the same time it'll appeal to the broad interests of the userbase and feature all creative content regardless of whether it relates to indie gaming?  it'll be low maintenance and will only need one or two people to sustain it, but it'll also have lots of original content and creative input from a variety of members?  this is sounding more and more like a pipedream or something that will be severely underwhelming with every vague assurance you give.  or, option c: you are just kind of blowing smoke to get people to shut up.

i don't really think i speak merely for myself here. the mainsite was too gw-centric, and what gw was is completely irrelevant and outdated. gw is the community and everybody knows it.

to some extent, i would say i agree with this, and that it was a bit misguided to expect that of gw.  but at the time i thought, and still think, that gw as a general website that reflects the interests of the community would be little more attractive than it would be as a gaming-centric website.  there were a lot of token random guys chiming in with "let's make gw a comedy site  ​", but how many people on gw are genuinely funny, or genuinely interesting?  i don't think this is anything we could support.  regardless, yes, i agree that a game dev site is outside the scope of the community's interest, but the problem with this is that the mistake is just being repeated again.  how many people give a shit about indie games?  probably only slightly more than the amount that give a shit about indie game development.  it's not an accurate reflection of the community, and i was guilty of this as well, but at the time a lot of us really thought if we got a mainsite up again for the first time in years, people really would have an interest, plus it just seemed like the only realistic option.  i'm not sure why anyone is going ahead with INDIE GAMES BLOG instead of learning from the error in judgment gz and i made when appraising what type of website gw would respond to.  in any event, i would say history has shown large, meandering topics are an awful way to form a decisive opinion about what needs done.  making a site based on a community's interest, and letting a community decide for itself, are two very different things!  gw just about tears itself apart trying to decide which pips to use; i would say consulting it as a whole as little as possible is the best route.  you don't need more than a few intelligent people who understand the community to do things well.

what you're saying is fine, and probably the most appropriate site for a place like gw, but what does this community really produce anymore?  you mentioned jamie.  alright, jamie's a creative guy in a lot of ways.  if this was a community of jamies, this would be a grand idea.  but the lit forum's dead, music creation is mostly just people shooting the shit about guitar stuff, and the art forum's activity has gone into a nosedive.  plus, we've never produced a notable amount of worthwhile games.  gw is a creative vacuum; i don't need more than two hands to count the amount of people who are regularly doing interesting creative things.  i don't think you can base a site on this!  i would've really liked to see a site like this when a lot of people were composing and drawing, and there were a lot of huge discussion topics on gw about video games and interesting shit in general, but i don't know... i probably feel how you felt months ago, but i don't see it going away for me.  that is to say, i don't feel like there's much going on here that's really interesting or thought-provoking anymore.  what you're suggesting is only fitting for a site that is intellectually and creatively prolific.  i wouldn't describe gw as either of these things anymore.  it's possible we simply disagree on the matter, and if that's the case, then i can see why you'd think this would be the best course of action instead of CROSSPOSTING INDIE GAMES BLOG.  but be honest, do you really care about what any more than a handful of people on gw are thinking or doing at this point?

think with a mainsite that doesn't have any sort of distinct focus you would start seeing people utilize it, not necessarily because it would be FOR GW, but because it would naturally coincide with what they're doing anyway, and gw would simply be an outlet for it.

gw6 was an indie game dev site, but really, the community section was a huge part of it, and people still didn't utilize that despite having freedom to post about their interests and whatever else.  what's more, the original gw blog was, if i understand you, almost precisely what you're suggesting, and it was plagued with inactivity from its inception.  we vocally encouraged them to write about ANYTHING AT ALL, to no avail.  regardless of whether or not they're given an outlet to discuss whatever is on their mind, it seems no one on gw really gives enough of a shit to bother.  keep in mind this was roughly a year ago, when gw was substantially more active.  subtract steel, bm, hl, and a few other notable contributors, and there is literally no one i would say could be relied for something like that.

it's easy to get stuck in the mentality that the community needs to be preserved or revived or whatever, but honestly, after giving it some real thought, i would say i disagree.  i would not have a problem if it ceased to exist and i think KEEPING ON for the sake of KEEPING ON is what drives a lot of people not to admit that there's nothing wrong with a site slowly dwindling away to nothing.  i think i told ase that i felt a lot of people had an interest in revitalizing gw more for what it used to be than what it is now, and i don't think that's a point the site is ever going to get back to.  i would say it is past the point where anything significant can be done, but if it isn't, or if you still care enough to try, a faceless indie gaming blog isn't going to do anything, and i'm not sure how people have managed to buy into any illusion that it would.  i was keeping track of that PLAN topic and was really astounded to see so many people so gung ho about CROSSPOSTING INDIE GAME BLOG as if this would legitimately fix anything at all.

things

i thought you had written this place off

My thoughts exactly.  Panda and I spent many a night pondering over what could be done to breathe new life into the mainpage but nothing ever really came to fruition.  I'll admit I was kinda bothered by the fact that I worked on the new design for weeks and nothing ever got implemented because apparently there is one other site in the internet that does what we were planning to do, but this new shit does seem to be a step in the right direction.

the choice to not implement it wasn't mine.  i said gz and i wouldn't do it anymore because given the circumstances, we were less than sure we could make it how we wanted to, and putting so much effort into a community you don't care about is kind of silly anyway.  but everything we came up with was still theoretically sound and could've been made by anyone who felt like it.  nothing was stopping them aside from the fact, despite expecting other people to do shit, they did not really feel the same applied to themselves

hundley has a point in that this topic is a very dumb idea and only really serves as a platform for general frustration and for drule to be vaguely obnoxious in that way drule always is, though.  i don't know what kind of reaction you expected but i wouldn't put up some half-assed wordpress blog and then call it "complaining" when people seek explanations or just an idea of what you're doing.  you really should've waited until you had something concrete to show instead of putting up what amounts to an UNDER CONSTRUCTION sign and acting like no one should be confused.  this in itself is just kind of funny but combined with things like archives not being accessible for whatever reason, it just amounts to a series of puzzling decisions that do not seem to come together into a cohesive idea.  for all i know the lack of access to archives could be based on some type of server shit you're sorting out with the blog or whatever, but this doesn't mean people shouldn't be asking questions about what the hell's going on.  this was really your own fault for telling them there was anything going on to begin with before it was ready to be implemented.  people like uprc are asking questions because they're confused and you're handling it all pretty badly.  maybe if you didn't want to answer so many questions you shouldn't have made so many weird changes so suddenly and then made a stupid topic about all of it???  this is why you do not tell people about this kind of thing halfway through.  it's just a waste of time.

with all of that said i wouldn't have consulted with gw either.  gw doesn't know what the fuck it wants.  it is just the same tired argument about being GENERAL COMEDY SITE//INDIE GAME SITE//WHAT ABOUT RM2K??  you could have a ten page topic filled with ambitious long posts by people who don't know what they're talking about and who won't do shit when CRUNCH TIME rolls around.  if this was a worthwhile community, having a topic about the direction for gw might make sense, but it's not, so it is better just to do things yourself.  the odd thing about what you're saying, hundley, is that i'm kind of surprised you're reacting to the way he's handling this so violently when you've said numerous times recently that the community is worthless.  if you actually think this then it should be easy to understand why there aren't BRAINSTORMING TOPICS.  nothing would ever happen if you relied on those kind of topics.  the only way anything actually gets done is if a few people decide to just do it.

i don't really care what you do with the website, but this was a less than ideal way to go about doing it and dealing with the people.  there's an interesting contrast here between the contrived GW ADMIN personality you seem to have constructed with all they Hey folks, Drule here! Peace. nonsense and the GOD STOP WHINING.....ITLL ALL BE CLEAR IN DUE TIME approach you seem to be taking with people asking questions in your own topic.  it's also sort of weird that the grand plan is GW7: THE ASTROJONE.  DOING SHIT yeah whatever but i don't know what would compel you to just make GW into a carbon copy of your own site.  gz told me you said the two were identical and then gave some spiel about how there would be abstract philosophical differences between the two.  what's the point?  generic crossposting indie games blog isn't going to bring in new members, and having a mainsite for the sake of having a mainsite is kind of absurd.  maybe you should've just put a redirect up to the astrojone and saved everyone some time

fellas, let's keep this cordial.  it's not worth it.  it's never worth it.

you succeeded

wait, i thought you didn't even know esiann until after you both were posting on gw?  also a hot jock stud huh.  ahaha, alright.

i mean the defining moment OF HIGH SCHOOL.  like when people think back to their shitty years as a dork or whatever it is always SITTING ALONE AT PROM that kind of quintessentially sums up the entire experience.  i don't think prom could be a defining moment of anything beyond your time in high school.

i mean i didnt go at all and i wouldn't have even considered it at the time but if i would have considered it, it would not have been stag.  its just funny to me because that is perhaps the DEFINING MOMENT in movies for former high school losers when they flashback to going to their proms alone.  guess this means your best days are to come